This is an auction for PATRICK WHITE: A LIFE, by David Marr.

"Marr's book is an unusually calm, unstraining, unjaded, and even curious work, fascinated with Patrick White but never fawning over or using him as an illustration of an artistic or psychological conclusion the biographer has come to. Like many of the best Nobel winners of recent decades, White - who wrote some of the most extraordinary prose of the century - is more known by name than read. But rather than academically reintroducing us to White's great achievement, novel by novel, Marr sticks to using the books as clues to White's life. It's a procedure that can mislead yet here doesn't - for White himself was never false, played no games with his life and art, made no toying distinctions or feints. Wealthy, homosexual, asthmatic, brutally candid, White looked to follow or start no circle; he was traumatically educated in England, served in the African campaign in WW II, and then he returned to a puritanical, philistine Australia to do his major work. As the best literary biography ought to do, this one sends us hungrily back to the novels - to see what they encompassed but also, too, to relish how the complexity of the author's own character boosted their art. Superb."

• Kirkus Review (US)

Patrick White (1912-1990), Australian novelist and playwright, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. His many novels include Voss, The Twyborn Affair, and Riders in the Chariot.

Paperback 1992.

727 pages + 79 photographs.

Good condition.

The cost of shipping is $6.95.

There is of course no charge for shipping if you collect this book from my shop in Palmerston North following the auction.

Payment within seven days, please.