Patrick White
Patrick White
Patrick Victor Martindale Whitewas an Australian writer who is widely regarded as one of the most important English-language novelists of the 20th century. From 1935 to his death, he published 12 novels, three short-story collections and eight plays...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 May 1912
CountryAustralia
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Wabash is one of America's greatest liberal arts colleges, rich in tradition and even richer in promise and possibilities. To be chosen to lead Wabash to new heights of achievement as its next president is a great honor.
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Well, good luck to you, kid! I'm going to write the Great Australian Novel.
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I just had a great time out there. When you get chances, you've got to bury them, and I did.
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We hoped that we could come out and get the first and the energy would pick us up, but they kept getting the bounces.
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We believe the land speaks to anyone who goes there and sees the site. It is very moving.
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St. Mary's and Wabash are in one important way very different. Wabash is a college for men; Saint Mary's, of course, a college for women. But both share a respect for students, a commitment to education of the whole person, and a calling of all students to greatness.
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The failure of The Aunt's Story and the need to learn a language afresh made me wonder whether I should ever write another word.
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Conversation is imperative if gaps are to be filled, and old age, it is the last gap but one.
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My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.
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In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.
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Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
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Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
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I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on.
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Even if a university should turn out to be another version of a school, I had decided I could lose myself afterwards as an anonymous particle of the London I already loved.