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Long recognized internationally as the most important writer of Australia, Patrick White is the first of his countrymen to win the Nobel Prize for literature. In addition, he has won prestigious local awards, such as the Miles Franklin Prize and the gold medal of the Australian Society. His novels have inspired many translations and an opera, his plays have aroused heated controversy, and his short stories are featured in standard Australian anthologies. Yet, neither artistic fame nor his right by birth to a place in the pastoral elite of Australia could lessen his inveterate pessimism that constituted, as he acknowledged, a deep strain of "black in White." A caustic satirist as well as a bold visionary, he discerned spiritual riches in the sun-scorched expanses of Australia but wastelands in its opulent dining rooms, cluttered with festive roasts and self-congratulatory platitudes. In these places he truly found "the Great Australian Emptiness," as he wrote memorably in "The Prodigal Son" (Australian Letters, April 1958), in a land where "the mind is the least of possessions .
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