Page "Christina Stead" Paragraph 2

Stead wrote 15 novels and several volumes of short stories in her lifetime.

She taught ' Workshop in the Novel ' at New York University in 1943 and 1944, and also worked as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1940s, contributing to the Madame Curie biopic and the John Ford and John Wayne war movie, They Were Expendable.

Her first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney ( 1934 ) dealt with the lives of radicals and dockworkers, but she was not a practitioner of social realism.

Stead's best-known novel, with the ironic title The Man Who Loved Children, is largely based on her own childhood, and was first published in 1940.

It was not until the poet Randall Jarrell wrote the introduction for a new American edition in 1965 that the novel began to receive a larger audience.

In 2005, the magazine Time included this work in their " 100 Best Novels from 1923 – 2005 ", and in 2010 American author Jonathan Franzen hailed the novel as a " masterpiece " in The New York Times.

Stead's Letty Fox: Her Luck, often regarded as an equally fine novel, was officially banned in Australia for several years because it was considered amoral and salacious.