'At an author event hosted in 1947 by the Fellowship of Australian Writers, Ruth Park met head-on the polarised reactions stirred by her novel The Harp in the South, as it appeared in instalments in the Sydney Morning Herald just prior to its publication as a book. Amid the raucous was one particularly belligerent man, as Miles Franklin recounts in a letter written after the event, who ‘kept on and on till people tried to laugh him down. He said he did not want to read stories about pregnant women and slums, that that was not literature.’' (Introduction)