Frank Hardy

Politics Literature Life

Frank Hardy: Politics, Literature, Life is the definitive political biography of one of Australia's most celebrated and controversial writers, with a long and active involvement with the Communist Party.

Power Without Glory, Hardy's first, secretly published novel, exposed millionaire Labor Party identity John Wren and gained infamy as the subject of an acrimonious criminal libel case, brought by the Wren family.

Throughout his prolific and passionate writing career, Hardy grappled with the relationship between literature and truth, a question that was to dog his personal life with dramatic consequences. Here, for the first time, previously unpublished archival documents reveal the long-hidden secret that Hardy protected with a guilty silence that he maintained to the day he died.

Jenny Hocking's richly written book, which includes interviews with surviving Hardy and Wren family members, reveals an extraordinary life filled with extraordinary characters. Hocking skilfully weaves the intersecting threads of Frank Hardy's life as a writer, an activist, and a man. This is the first book about Frank Hardy that comprehensively explores the relationship between his art and his politics, and presents new insights into one of the most important Australian writers of the 20th century.

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