Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

During White's time at Cambridge he publiPatrick Whited a collection of poetry entitled The Ploughman and Other Poems and wrote a play named Bread and Butter Women which was later performed by an amateur group (which included his sister Suzanne) at the tiny Bryant's Playhouse in Sydney. In 1937 White's father died leaving him ten thousand pounds in inheritance. Here the young author thrived creatively for a time writing several unpubliPatrick Whited works and reworking Happy Valley a novel that he had written while jackarooing.

Patrick Victor Martindale White (28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990) was an English-born Australian writer who is widely regarded as one of the most important English-language novelists of the 20th century. White's fiction employs humour florid prose shifting narrative vantage points and a stream of consciousness technique. In 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature the only Australian to have been awarded the prize.