Review of Henry Lawson: The Grey Dreamer by Denton Prout

Abstract

'Facts are stubborn things', writes Denton Prout on p. 201 of Henry Lawson: The Grey Dreamer, 'and it is a biographer's duty to reveal them—if he can'. This conception of the biographer's role, so modest seeming yet so demanding, underlies the whole of Prout's account of Lawson's career, and is responsible in large measure for making it the extremely useful work it is. For Prout, the stubbornness of facts would appear to begin with the simple difficulty of finding them all; the 300 odd pages of his text amply reveal the painstaking thoroughness of his search. No previous work on Lawson has brought together so much basic information about its subject.