Description
SECONDHAND BOOK
Shortly before Walter Murdoch died in 1971, aged nearly 96, the critic Arthur Phillips had written that he had ‘probably given more pleasure to more readers than any other Australian prose writer’. As ‘Elzevir’ of the Melbourne Argus, Murdoch was already celebrated for his literary column ‘Books and Men’ when in 1913 he became professor of English in the new University of Western Australia. He continued to entertain and instruct not only his university students but, through his writings, two generations of Australians.
The publication of his selected articles as books, beginning with Speaking Personally (1930), made Murdoch the ‘essayist’ the friend of thousands beyond those already familiar with his work in newspapers. He was loved for his wit and wisdom and his insistence on ‘the sacred duty of growling’. He was a humorist but he was also a deeply serious teacher, who persistently expounded the value of ‘a love of reading and a capacity for clear expression’. And (as he confessed) he could not avoid the temptation to preach. All his life he preached against ‘the immemorial enemies – cruelty, injustice, humbug and intolerance’.
John La Nauze, the author of this account of a memorable Australian, was one of Murdoch’s pupils.
Specifications:
Condition: Fair – very faded and barely legible spine but dust jacket otherwise intact with no rips, some minor marks.
Publisher: Melbourne University Press:
Year: 1977
Format: Hardback, with dustjacket
Pages: 189pp
ISBN: 0522841198
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