The Romance of the Swag
Melbourne
:
E. W. Cole
,
1907
Z1846504
1907
selected work
short story
prose
Reprint of the second part of Children of the Bush (1902). According to Colin Roderick 'Latter-day corruptions crept in when Lawson's publisher emended the texts in 1924 to fit the stories into two volumes in the Platypus Series' (Henry Lawson: Short Stories and Sketches 1888-1922, p. xviii)
Send Round the Hat
Sydney
:
Angus and Robertson
,
1907
Z76494
1907
selected work
short story
humour
' When Henry Lawson died in 1922, he was publicly honoured as a "national writer," but for the last twenty years of his life he had been a "derelict artist," caught in a cycle of poverty, alcoholism and depression, humiliated, frustrated, often ashamed of the work that he was producing and haunted by the sense of the writer that he might have been. Almost a century later, there is no biography that adequately portrays the man and the circumstances that contributed to his collapse. Underlying this article, which considers aspects of his struggle to realize his literary ambitions, is the assumption that because Lawson's work has such a strong autobiographical element, the way in which his life is read inevitably colours how his writing is read. Until there is a biography in which the tragic dimension of his life is fully recognized, our understanding of Lawson's literary achievement remains incomplete.' (Publication abstract)
' When Henry Lawson died in 1922, he was publicly honoured as a "national writer," but for the last twenty years of his life he had been a "derelict artist," caught in a cycle of poverty, alcoholism and depression, humiliated, frustrated, often ashamed of the work that he was producing and haunted by the sense of the writer that he might have been. Almost a century later, there is no biography that adequately portrays the man and the circumstances that contributed to his collapse. Underlying this article, which considers aspects of his struggle to realize his literary ambitions, is the assumption that because Lawson's work has such a strong autobiographical element, the way in which his life is read inevitably colours how his writing is read. Until there is a biography in which the tragic dimension of his life is fully recognized, our understanding of Lawson's literary achievement remains incomplete.' (Publication abstract)
