White, Patrick 1912–

The Nobel Laureate in Literature for 1973, White is a British-born Australian author of novels, plays, and short stories. Although the Swedish Academy commended him for "introducing a new continent to literature," he is, as Pearl K. Bell affirms, a modern writer rather than a regional realist, displaying "a characteristically twentieth-century obsession with human loneliness and alienation, and with the tragic perversions of personality." (See also CLC, Vols. 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 81-84.)