Patrick White; Nobel Prize-Winning Author

Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White, whose complex novels made him among the best known writers about his Australian homeland, died Sunday after a lengthy illness. He was 78.

No cause of death was given.

A private, retiring man most of his life, White in recent years began boldly speaking out on Australian political issues, denouncing what he perceived as dishonesty in some areas of government, urging Australia to better itself and raising the alarms against pollution, consumerism, the plight of the aborigines and other topics.

“As a homosexual I have always known what it is to be an outsider,” he said earlier this year in championing one political cause. “It has given me added insight into the plight of the immigrant. . . .”

As novelist, poet and playwright, White repeatedly returned to the theme of man’s isolation, an alienation he described in his 1982 autobiography, “Flaws in the Glass.”

In 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for introducing “a new continent” to literary art. A history of asthma forced White to send a substitute to accept the award for the novel, “Eye of the Storm,” a portrait of the final days of an elderly woman whose greedy relatives await her demise. The work also explored Australians’ attitudes toward their European cultural roots.

Born on May 28, 1912, in London, Patrick Victor Martindale White spent his childhood in Australia. In his early teens, he was sent to public schools in England where, he said, he felt isolated and, with the acquisition of a British accent, rejected by Australians. White also described in his biography feelings that he had disappointed his parents, who would have been happier if he had been a lawyer or had followed in his father’s footsteps. His father was a sheep rancher.

Educated at King’s College, Cambridge, White served as an intelligence officer in the Royal Air Force during World War II.

He credited Manoly Lascaris, his companion of more than 40 years, as “this small Greek of immense moral strength, who became the central mandala in my life’s hitherto messy design.”

White’s first novel, “Happy Valley,” published in 1939, was awarded the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal, as was “The Tree of Man,” published in 1955.

Considered one of Australia’s leading authors, his works were required reading in many high schools and universities.

Essayist Margaret B. Lewis, in the 1986 reference work, “Contemporary Novelists,” described White as “a writer who makes serious demands of his readers, straining prose to the utmost poetic limits, putting severe pressure on syntax and vocabulary and stretching credence to an unusual degree in his search for the transcendent in the lives of his idiosyncratic characters.”

“Since the war, my life has been practically uneventful,” White wrote for a 1955 reference work on authors. “I returned to Australia to a small property in Castle Hill, where I breed schnauzers, saanen goats, cultivate olives and citrus fruit, grow vegetables and live more or less off my own produce.”