The Tree of Man

Patrick White (1912-1990) was born in England in 1912, when his parents were in Europe for two years; at six months he was taken back to Australia, where his father owned a sheep station. When he was thirteen, he went to school in England, to Cheltenham, “where it was understood, the climate would be temperate and a colonial acceptable.” Neither proved true, and after four rather miserable years there he went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he specialized in languages. After leaving the university he settled in London, determined to become a writer. His first novel, Happy Valley, was published in 1939 and his second, The Living and the Dead, in 1941. During the war he was an RAF Intelligence Officer in the Middle East and Greece. After the war he returned to Australia.