Randolph Stow was the most gifted and accomplished of the young Australian writers who challenged the dominance of the social realist mode in Australian fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. Following the lead of Patrick White, who had introduced the modernist novel to Australia, and of modernist painters such as Sidney Nolan and Fred Williams, Stow chose in his novels to combine a degree of realism with a poetic response to the Australian landscape, a preoccupation with the inner lives of his characters, and a sense of the mythic qualities of the Australian experience. A youthful prodigy, Stow had published three novels and a book of poems, and won four literary awards, by the time he was twenty-three. The third of these novels,
To the Islands(1958), quickly attained classic status, an…
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Citation: Hassall, Anthony John. "Randolph Stow". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 October 2008; last revised 22 July 2022. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4254, accessed 23 April 2024.]
