Frank Sargeson [Norris Frank Davey], 1903–1982

Abstract

‘It is not often a writer can be said to have become a symbol in his own lifetime. It is this quality of your achievement that has prompted us to remember this present occasion’. So Frank Sargeson’s fellow New Zealand fiction-writers ended ‘A Letter to Frank Sargeson’, published in Landfall in March 1953 to mark his fiftieth birthday. They were affirming his status as the most significant writer of prose fiction to emerge from that generation that began in the 1930s to create a modern New Zealand Literature. They were celebrating him first as the creator of the New Zealand critical realist short story and short novel, the writer who provided the literary model with which most of those signing the letter had started. But they were also celebrating him as a symbol and a model not only for what he wrote but for where and how he wrote it.