The Tree of Man was published by Viking in New York in 1955 (the UK edition from Eyre & Spottiswoode followed in 1956). It was White’s deliberate attempt to write a great Australian novel — to render the lives of ordinary Australians with the same intensity and ambition that Joyce had brought to Dubliners or Faulkner to Yoknapatawpha County.
Stan Parker takes a piece of bush outside Sydney, clears it, builds a house, marries Amy. They have children. They survive flood, fire, drought. The town grows around them. Their children grow up and disappoint them (or rather, live lives their parents cannot fully comprehend). Stan ages, his body fails, his wife becomes remote. He dies — and in the act of dying, achieves a moment of visionary apprehension that may be the presence of God or may be simply the final firing of consciousness.
The novel’s method is radical: White takes the most ordinary events (plowing a field, cooking a meal, driving a cart to town, sitting on a porch in the evening) and renders them in prose so metaphorically dense, so attentive to the numinous within the mundane, that they acquire an almost unbearable significance. A storm is not merely a storm but an event in consciousness; a marriage is not merely a social arrangement but a metaphysical encounter between two incomprehensible subjectivities.
The novel was poorly received in Australia (which in 1955 had little tolerance for literary modernism applied to its own experience) but championed in England and America. It established White internationally and began the process that would lead to the Nobel Prize — a prize White accepted but whose ceremony he refused to attend.
Collecting The Tree of Man
First edition (Viking, New York, 1955): Cloth binding, dust jacket. Precedes UK edition.
First UK edition (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1956): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- Viking first US edition in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Eyre & Spottiswoode first UK edition in dust jacket: $75–$200
- Signed first edition: $300–$800
- Without jacket: $20–$40
White’s breakthrough novel and the foundation of modern Australian literary fiction. Increasingly valued by collectors as White’s reputation continues to grow posthumously.