Patrick Victor Martindale White (1912-1990) was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for literature. He used religious experience and symbolism to show man's struggle to transcend the "dreary, everyday life."

Patrick White was born in London on May 28, 1912, of Australian parents. His early education was at Tudor House, Moss Vale, New South Wales (an Anglican school). He went to England to attend Cheltenham College, then returned to Australia, where he gained experience as a jackeroo, or "gentleman stockman," on sheep- and cattle-grazing properties in New South Wales. At 22 he returned to England to study at King's College, Cambridge. Subsequently, he traveled extensively in Europe and the United States.

White's first novel, Happy Valley (1939), a somewhat ironic story of a doctor in a mountain township of New South Wales, uses the stream-of-consciousness method and shows White's attention to suffering and solitude as essential elements of the human...