SOURCE: “Short Stories,” in Patrick White, Oliver and Boyd LTD, 1967, pp.66–89.

In the following excerpt, Argyle points out that while White is primarily known as a novelist, his short stories show the same “intelligence” and “wealth of experience” that mark the author's longer fiction.

When in the early sixties White began publishing those stories which he has since collected, with two additions, under the title of The Burnt Ones, many of his recent English readers were surprised that a novelist who dealt in great themes at great length should bother with an art-form used mainly by beginners. It had also become an axiom among many professional English readers of novels that the short-story was dead. Had they not, they felt, helped to kill it, assisted by a dearth of magazines and a surfeit of television and Somerset Maugham? With its roots in Scotland and its greatest modern practitioners...