Happy Valley: Text Classics

Patrick White's magnificent debut novel, available for the first time since 1939.

Based on Patrick White's own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro in southeastern New South Wales, Happy Valley paints a portrait of a community in a desolate landscape. It is a jagged and restless study of small-town and country life.

This mesmerizing first novel is the missing piece in the extraordinary jigsaw of White's work.

White did not allow the novel to be republished in English in his lifetime. Its appearance now in the Text Classics series is a major literary event.

Patrick White was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 and is considered one of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century. Following his debut, Happy Valley, White went on to publish twelve novels, including The Aunt’s Story, Voss, The Eye of the Storm, and The Twyborn Affair. He died in 1990, aged seventy-eight.

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England and served in the RAF before returning to Australia after World War II.

Happy Valley, White’s first novel, is set in a small country town in the Snowy Mountains and is based on his experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern New South Wales. In Happy Valley White found a more honest ?lumbering after truth’ than in the plays he had written to date. He said, ?I began to write from the inside out when Roy de Maistre introduced me to abstract painting’, and he dedicated the novel to the artist.

White went on to publish twelve further novels (one posthumously), three short-story collections and eight plays. His novels include The Aunt’s Story and Voss, which won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Eye of the Storm and The Twyborn Affair.He was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1973, and is considered one of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century.White died in 1990, aged seventy-eight.

Peter Craven is one of Australia’s best-known literary critics. He was a founding editor of Scripsi, Quarterly Essay and the Best of Anthologies. Peter wrote introductions to The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and Happy Valley.