Patrick White was born in England and brought back to Australia as a baby, where his father owned a sheep station. He returned to England as an adolescent to attend boarding school, and then went on to study languages at King's College, Cambridge. He lived in London after graduating and wrote several novels, with a stint as an intelligence officer in the Middle East during World War II. He returned once more to Australia after the war. He has published eight novels and two short story collections, with The Vivisector considered to be his magnum opus. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. In his obituary in the New York Times, the author said that White "did more than any other writer to put Australian literature on the international map."
The Vivisector, published in 1970, is Patrick White's eighth and longest novel. White dedicated the novel to the painter Sidney Nolan but denied that the main character, Hurtle Duffield, was based on him. The novel is often considered a largely...
