Patrick White: Letters edited by David Marr

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges.

His seventy-year correspondence from childhood in the First World War until his death in 1990 is earthy, shrewd, camp, savage, dramatic, very funny and free. White wrote novels to impress a hostile world, but most of his correspondence was written to amuse, inform, and, at times, upbraid his friends. He was an old man before he wrote fiction as easy and direct as the best of his letters.

White kept no copies of his correspondence, and all the letters he received were thrown away. As friends and relations died, and bundles of his own letters came back to him, White destroyed them. He spoke of his perpetual shedding as a way of keeping free of the past's stale entanglements. As early as the 1950s, he urged his correspondents to burn his letters. A few of White's correspondents did so; some lied that they had; most carefully stored White's letters away.

This collection, the culmination of ten years' work and reflection by David Marr, author of the well-received biography Patrick White: A Life, tells the story of White's life in his own words. These are the letters of a great writer, a profound critic, a gossip with the sharpest eyes and tongue, a man who loved and hated ferociously, a keen cook, an angry patriot, and a believer never free of doubt.

Patrick White: Letters is an unexpected and final volume of prose by Australia's most acclaimed novelist, writing on everything from cooking and dogs to global politics. Only a few scraps of White's letters have been published before. (back cover)