Understanding Patrick White’s Voss

Best known as the author of such novels as The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957), Patrick White (1912-1990) remains an important figure in Australian Literature. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 for “an authentic voice that carries across the world,” including the gold medal of the Australian Literary Society in 1941. Full name Patrick Victor Martindale White is a British-born Australian author who wrote twelve volumes of novels, eight volumes of plays, three volumes of short fiction, three volumes of poetry including autobiography and speeches. Although the Swedish Academy commended him for introducing a new continent to literature, he is a modern writer rather than a regional realist, displaying a characteristically twentieth-century obsession with human loneliness and alienation, and with the tragic perversions of personality.