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Collected Short Stories

Collected Short Stories

Summary

In this collection of short novels and stories, Patrick White explores the gulf - by turns funny and unbearably sad - between life's expectations and its realities. With immense understanding and compassion, he captures the longings that underlie the relationships of men and women, and the tender pathos of the heart's secrets.

About the author

Patrick White

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war.
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.
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