Memoirs of Many in One: Text Classics

Patrick White

Jun 2019 · Text Publishing

About this ebook

The last Patrick White novel published in his lifetime, Memoirs of Many in One presents the eccentric, often fantastical recollections of the ageing actor, Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray. These are ‘edited’ by the writer Patrick White, her friend and executor, who is often the target of her scorn. Witty and affecting, Memoirs reveals another side of White’s fiction even as it echoes many of the themes running through his work.

‘A strong case could be made for White as the finest and most profound novelist anywhere in the world now working in English...Memoirs of Many in One will fascinate any reader.’ Washington Post

‘A last work in which everything that was serious in the early books suffered a final daring transformation to burlesque: not least of all the author, that impossible person Patrick White.’ David Malouf

About the author

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 and served in the RAF, before returning to Australia after World War II.

Happy Valley, White’s first novel, is set in a small country town in the Snowy Mountains and is based on his experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo.

White went on to publish twelve further novels (one posthumously), three short-story collections and eight plays. His novels include The Aunt’s Story and Voss, which won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Eye of the Storm and The Twyborn Affair.

He was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1973, and is considered one of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century.

White died in 1990, aged seventy-eight.