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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Conversation is imperative if gaps are to be filled, and old age, it is the last gap but one.
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We had probably three charges filed in the year and a half the law was in effect ... That roughly indicates the frequency of these offenses.
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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.
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As a result of the asthma I was sent to school in the country, and only visited Sydney for brief, violently asthmatic sojourns on my way to a house we owned in the Blue Mountains.
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I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.
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I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.