Writer, born in London, UK of Australian parents. His youth was spent partly in Australia, and partly in England, where he studied at Cambridge. His first novel, Happy Valley, appeared in 1939, and after service as an intelligence officer in World War 2 he returned to Australia, where he wrote several novels, short stories, and plays, achieving international success with The Tree of Man (1954), an epic of pioneer Australia, and Voss (1957), a novel on a similar scale. A poetic writer of great intensity and some wit, he wrote of great visionaries as well as the sordidness of the everyday. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. His autobiographical Flaws in the Glass was published in 1981, and he later became vocal on such issues as Aboriginal affairs and the environment.
Childhood and adolescence
Although his parents were Australian, White was born in Knightsbridge, London. In 1916, at the age of four, White developed asthma, a condition that had taken the life of his maternal grandfather. At the age of ten, White was sent to Tudor House School, a boarding school in the New South Wales highlands, in an attempt to calm his asthma. At boarding school he started to write plays. In 1924, the boarding school ran into financial trouble, and the headmaster suggested that White be sent to boarding school in England, a suggestion to which his parents acceded.
White struggled to adjust to his new surroundings at Cheltenham College, his new school. White withdrew inside himself and had few friends there. When Waterall left school, White withdrew into himself again. He asked his parents if he could leave school to become an actor, and they compromised, allowing him to finish school early on the condition that he came home to Australia first, to try life on the land.
Travelling the world
White spent two years working as a stockman at Bolaro, a 73 km² station on the edge of the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales. White grew to respect the land, and his health started to improve.
From 1932 to 1935, White lived in England, studying French and German literature at King's College, Cambridge. Then one night, the student priest, after an awkward liaison with two women, admitted to White that women meant nothing to him sexually;
While at Cambridge University, a collection of his poems was published under the title The Ploughman and Other Poems, and wrote a play that was performed by an amateur group. White received his Bachelor of Arts in 1935, and briefly settled in London, where he lived in an area that was frequented by artists. Here, he thrived for a time, writing several unpublished works and reworking a novel, Happy Valley, that he had written while jackarooing. He wrote another novel, Nightside, but abandoned it after receiving negative comments.
Towards the end of the 1930s, White spent some time in the United States, including Cape Cod, Massachusetts and New York City, where he wrote The Living and the Dead.
The growth of White's writing career
After the war, he returned to Australia once again, buying an old house in Castle Hill, in the semi-rural outskirts of Sydney. Here, White settled down with Manoly Lascaris, the officer he had met during the war. During these years, he started to make a reputation for himself as a writer, publishing The Aunt's Story and The Tree of Man, which was published in the United States in 1955 and shortly after in England. The Tree of Man was released to rave reviews in the US, but, in what was to become a typical pattern, was panned by Australian critics. White had doubts about whether to continue writing, after his books were largely ignored in Australia (three of them having been called ‘un-Australian’ by critics), but decided to keep going.
In 1961, White published Riders in the Chariot. In 1963, White and Lascaris decided to sell the house at Castle Hill that they had named "Dogwoods". these works include the collection of short stories, The Burnt Ones, and the play, The Season at Sarsaparilla.
In 1968, White wrote The Vivisector, a character portrait of an artist. Many people drew links to his friend, artist Sidney Nolan, but White always vehemently denied that it was about Nolan. White was approached by Harry M.
In 1973, he was rewarded with his Nobel Prize for Literature, "for an epic and psychological narrative art, which has introduced a new continent into literature". White had his friend, painter Sidney Nolan, travel to Stockholm to accept the prize on his behalf. The announcement of the award had immediate effects on his career: his publisher doubled the print run for The Eye of the Storm and gave him a larger advance for his next novel. He used the money from the prize to establish a trust for the Patrick White Award. White was also made Australian of the Year.
The twilight years
He supported Gough Whitlam's Labor government of 1972 to 1975, and after Whitlam was ousted in the 1975 constitutional crisis, became particularly anti-royalist.
During the 1970s, White’s health began to deteriorate—his teeth were crumbling, his eyesight was failing and he had chronic lung problems. In 1979, his novel The Twyborn Affair was short-listed for the Booker Prize, but White requested that it be removed, to give younger writers a chance. Soon after, White announced that he had written his last novel, and in the future, he would only write for radio or the stage.
In 1981, White published his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait, which explored several issues he had said little about publicly beforehand, such as his homosexuality and his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize personally. On Palm Sunday, 1982, White addressed a crowd of 30,000 people, calling for a ban on uranium mining and for the destruction of nuclear weapons.
In 1986 he published one last novel, Memoirs of Many in One, though that was curiously attributed as being "by Alex Xenophon Demirjan Gray, edited by Patrick White". White refused to see it when it was first performed at the Adelaide Festival, because Queen Elizabeth II had been invited, instead choosing to see it in Sydney. In 1987, White wrote Three Uneasy Pieces, with his musings on ageing and our efforts to achieve aesthetic perfection. When David Marr finished his biography of White in July 1990, White sat with him for nine days going over the details.
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