Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Patrick (Victor Matindale) White” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Patrick (Victor Matindale) White

(1912 – 1990)

Patrick White was an Australian novelist, short story writer and playwright who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. In his work White combines myth, symbols and allegory. White’s international breakthrough novel was Voss, published in 1957. Riders In The Chariot, which contains a powerful indictment of Australian suburban life, established him as one of the most important modern writers. He was born in London of Australian parents. His youth was spent partly in Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, and partly in England. At the age of 13 he was sent to Cheltenham College. He returned to Australia and worked for two years as a jackaroo on a remote sheep station before starting to study French and German literature at Cam-bridge, receiving his B.A. in 1935. White settled in London and wrote several unpublished novels.

His first published novel, Happy Valley, appeared in 1939. The story is set in New South Wales. The book was followed by The Living And The Dead (1941), set in pre-war London, and The Aunt’s Story (1948), a comic account of the travels of an independent Australian spinster, Theodora Goodman. During World War II White served in the Royal Air Force Intelligence unit in Greece and The Middle East. After the war White returned to Australia with a Greek friend, Manoly Lascaris. They bought an old house in Castle Hill, a suburb of Sydney. For the next eighteen years they lived a farmers life, selling flowers, vegetables, milk and cream. During these years Write wrote his first important work, The Aunt’s  Story (1948). In 1955 White’s long family saga, The Tree Of Man was published. The novel immediately, established his reputation as a major writer, often compared to Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, and D.H. Lawrence. The epic theme was continued in Voss, which returns to the heroic Australian past. It depicts the doomed attempt of a Nietzschean German visionary, Johann Voss, to lead an expedition across the continent in 1845. He is bound in a form of mystic communion with Laura Trevelyan, who, at home in Sydney, suffers with him. The true record of Ludwig Leichardt, who died in the desert in 1848, inspired the story. During the 1960s White published several books or plays depicting Sarsaparilla, a fictitious Australian suburb, among them Riders in the Chariot, The Burnt Ones(1964), a collection of short stories, and plays The Season At Sarsaparilla, A Cheery Soul, and the novel The Solid Mandala (1966), which was influenced by thoughts of Carl Jung.

White died on September 30, 1990 in Sydney after a long illness. A selection of White’s letters, edited by his biographer David Marr, was published in 1996.