AustLit

'The author of thirty books with international sales in excess of sixty million copies, Morris West was undoubtedly the most successful Australian novelist. Yet his work has received little serious, critical notice. In part this was due to academic prejudice against popular fiction. He also suffered from being labelled a Catholic novelist, as Judah Waten and Frank Hardy suffered from being labelled left-wing novelists. The chattering classes never warmed to him. The glitterati rejected him because he was a Roman Catholic and believed in God. The Catholics were unenthusiastic because of his self-appointed role as vocal critic of the church. The academics ignored him because in the years of his success fiction deemed to be commercial was not discussed in lit. crit. And since most of his fiction was set in Italy, the U.S.A. and Asia, rather than Australia, he tended to get ignored in the development of Australian Literature studies. His leaving his first marriage and leaving Australia provoked resentment in the media. In writing political thrillers about public issues, in maintaining an independent and uncompromising critical stance, he inevitably offended many powerful interest groups. His refusal to accept the offer of a formal political role from the Labor Party caused deep offence, as he recorded in his memoir, A View from the Ridge. Yet the critical industry has been able to accommodate other commercially successful writers, and other Catholic writers. West, however, was a consistently questioning, challenging, oppositional voice.   Conformist Catholics saw him as troublesome and critical, the left categorized him as Catholic and failed to read him. This was a mistake.' (Introduction)