Patrick Victor Martindale White (28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990) was an Australian novelist and playwright who explored themes of religious experience, personal identity and the conflict between visionary individuals and a materialistic, conformist society.

Influenced by the modernism of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, he developed a complex literary style and a body of work which challenged the dominant realist prose tradition of his home country, was satirical of Australian society, and sharply divided local critics.

In the 1960s he wrote the novels Riders in the Chariot (1961) and The Solid Mandala (1966), and a series of plays including The Season at Sarsaparilla and A Cheery Soul which had a major impact on Australian theatre.

From the late 1960s, White became increasingly involved in public affairs, opposing the Vietnam war and supporting Aboriginal self-determination, nuclear disarmament and various environmental causes.

[22] White sailed back to Australia in December 1947, and during his voyage The Aunt's Story was published in the United States to very favourable reviews and strong sales.

[24] The reviews of The Aunt's Story in the British and Australian press were less enthusiastic than those in America, and White was unable to interest theatres in Australia or overseas in producing The Ham Funeral.

He entertained a close circle of friends at his home but always felt himself to be an outsider: "first as a child with what kind of strange gift no one quite knew; then a despised colonial in an English public school; finally an artist in horrified Australia.

The festival governors, however, rejected the play citing concerns about "a piece of work which quite fails to reconcile poetry with social realism" and a scene involving an aborted foetus in a dustbin.

He was opposed to Australia's involvement in the Vietnam war, and in December 1969 he participated in his first political demonstration, breaking the law by publicly inciting young men not to register for military conscription.

The following year, he campaigned against censorship and gave evidence in favour of the publication of Philip Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint at obscenity trials in Melbourne and Sydney.

In my case to win the prize would upset my life far too much, and it would embarrass me to be held up to the world as an Australian writer when, apart from the accident of blood, I feel I am temperamentally a cosmopolitan Londoner".

He delayed sending it to his American publishers, Viking, because The Vivisector had sold poorly in America and he hoped positive reviews of the new work in Britain would increase interest in the United States.

White, however, refused to have Happy Valley republished as he considered it an inferior early work and he was afraid that some of the people on whom characters were based might sue for defamation.

[46] In May 1974, White gave a speech in support of the re-election of the Whitlam Labor government, stating that it was necessary for Australia to create: "an intellectual climate from which artists would no longer feel the need to flee.

He wrote to the re-elected prime minister Gough Whitlam on the issue and the campaign eventually forced the government to suspend its approval of mining and hold an inquiry on the matter.

[51] In 1976, White was working on a new novel, The Twyborn Affair, partly based on aspects of his own life and that of male Antarctic explorer Herbert Dyce-Murphy (1879–1971) who had lived as a woman for several years.

[55] In October 1979, White started work on a memoir, Flaws in the Glass, in which he planned to write publicly for the first time about his homosexuality and his relationship with Manoly Lascaris.

Posing as the editor of the memoirs of Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, White felt free to explore various aspects of his own character.

(I think the turning point came during a season of unending rain at Castle Hill when I fell flat on my back one day in the mud and starting cursing a God I had convinced myself didn't exist.

He publicly supported the Australian Labor Party in the federal elections of 1972, 1974 and 1975 despite a falling out with the prime minister Gough Whitlam over sand mining on Fraser Island.

[77] White's first published novel, Happy Valley (1939), received favourable reviews in Britain and Australia, although some critics noted that it was too derivative of Joyce, Lawrence and Woolf.

[3] Katherine Brisbane states that the reception of White's plays has been ambivalent as they mix realism, expressionism and poetic and vernacular dialogue in a way which has challenged audiences and directors.

[91] White satirises what he called, in 1958, "The Great Australian Emptiness"in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which human teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves.

"[92]The academic Mark Williams argues that White places the religious impulse at the centre of the human condition and his work, adding that "religion is one of the central values, along with art and love, which he considers to be denigrated in his homeland.

"[93] Kiernan notes a division among critics over whether "he is essentially a simple and traditional writer who affirms a religious, even mystical view of life, or one who is distinctively modern, sophisticated and ironic, continually exploring transcendent possibilities but with detachment and even scepticism.

[74][95] Marr, Williams and Kiernan, however, state that White drew on various religious and mystical traditions in his work including Judaism, Jungian archetypes and gnosticism.

"[104] His transitions between realist, expressionist, symbolist and romantic modes[105][106] were a conscious attempt to demonstrate that "the Australian novel is not necessarily the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism.

"[3] Kiernan states that in Voss the theme of the outsider as visionary explorer of the human condition is undercut by ironic comedy and parodies of the "gothic excess" of romantic literature.

[108] Critic Susan Lever considers White a pivotal figure in Australian literature, stating that he made the novel, rather than poetry, the pre-eminent literary form.

He "transformed the possibilities of the Australian novel by demonstrating that it was a place to test ideas against complex spiritual, psychological and emotional experience, not only an avenue for national storytelling.