Patrick White, winner of the Nobel Prize and author of more than a dozen novels and plays - including Voss, The Vivisector and The Twyborn Affair - lived an extraordinary life. David Marr's brilliant biography draws not only on a wide range of original research but also on the single most difficult and important source of all: the man himself. In the weeks before his death, White read the final manuscript, which for richness of detail, authority and balance is stunning.
Throughout his exciting narrative, Marr explores the roots of White's writing and unearths the raw material of his remarkable art. He makes plain the central fact of White's life as an artist: the homosexuality that formed his view of himself as an outcast and stranger able to penetrate the hearts of both men and women. Gracefully written and exhaustively researched, Patrick White is a biography of classic excellence - sympathetic, objective, penetrating and as blunt, when necessary, as White himself.

I found the biog hard to put down, unlike White's fiction which I find easy to put down! Marr has written a scholarly yet entertaining biography, and you really feel you come to know something about an Australian icon - our only Nobel laureate in literature.
In everything i have read (including White's own portrait of himself, Flaws In The Glass) he comes across as a horrible man - a misogynist, but with some political principles with which I might agree.

Nevertheless, that is not the point of literature, or art, to be loved by one and all. White's voice certainly added immensely to the cultural life of this country, and it is worth getting to know something about his life and works. Marr's book is an excellent place to start. ( )