Table of Contents

List of illustrations
Preface
Abbreviations
Note on currency
Chronology

Introduction: lives of works

1. A writing career in the making: Lawson’s early life
2. Lawson in the literary marketplace: the Worker, the Bulletin and Short Stories in Prose and Verse
3. Author and publisher: Lawson and Angus & Robertson
4. The revision and copy-editing of While the Billy Boils: Lawson and Arthur W. Jose
5. The making of a book: texts and illustrations
6. Respecting the marketplace: the publishers’ natural wish to make a fat 5s. volume
7. Lawson’s no longer: publication of While the Billy Boils
8. Early reception of While the Billy Boils: the first five years
9. Who made the money, and how much?; or, why Lawson went to England
10. ‘Pursuing literature’: Lawson’s stories in Britain 1900–1902
11. The afterlife of While the Billy Boils
12. Lawson’s reputation in the postwar period
13. Australian literary criticism and scholarly editing from the 1980s: While the Billy Boils as cross-section
Appendix 1: a production history of Edward Dyson’s Rhymes from the Mines
Appendix 2: the curious history of the Frank Mahony illustrations in While the Billy Boils
Appendix 3: postwar printings of While the Billy Boils and prose selections
Appendix 4: Angus & Robertson’s record-keeping
Index

Promotional Information

Biography of a Book traces the life of Henry Lawson's While the Billy Boils (1896) before, during and after its initial publication.

About the Author

Paul Eggert is professor emeritus of English literature and Australian Research Council professorial fellow at the University of New South Wales (Canberra).

Reviews

‘Biography of a Book: Henry Lawson's While the Billy Boils is ... beautifully designed and produced. It is highly readable and intellectually audacious: the biography of a book rather than an author.’
*Sydney Morning Herald*

'The text was a collaborative effort – Lawson was not in sole control – and it is this collaboration which is so skilfully unwoven and dissected in Biography of a Book ... Biography of a Book rewrites literary history. For example, the myth of the 1890s, the spuriousness of which has been adumbrated previously by others, but without the benefit of the empirical evidence which Eggert now brings to the table, is severely shaken.'
*Australian Book Review*