of The Female Eunuch, has spent much of her career in England but continues to study, critique, condemn and adore her homeland (recent work includes Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood, 2004). Other contemporary works and authors Martin Boyd (1893–1972) was a distinguished memoirist, novelist and poet, whose works included social comedies and the serious reflections of a pacifist faced with a time of war. Among his Langton series of novels—The Cardboard Crown (1952), A Difficult Young Man (1955), Outbreak of Love (1957)—earned high praise in Britain and the United States, though despite their Australian themes, were largely ignored in Australia. Patrick White (1912–1990) became the first Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature". White's first novel, Happy Valley (1939) was inspired by the landscape and his work as a jackaroo on the land at Adaminaby in the Snowy Mountains, but became an international success and won the Australian Literary Society's gold medal. Born to a conservative, wealthy Anglo-Australian family, he later wrote of conviction in left-wing causes and lived as a homosexual. Never destined for life on the land, he enrolled at Cambridge where he became a published poet. White developed as a novelist, but also had major theatrical success—including The Season at Sarsaparilla. White followed The Tree of Man with Voss, which became the first winner of the Miles Franklin Award. A subsequent novel, Riders in the Chariot also received a Miles Franklin award—but White later refused to permit his novels to be entered for literary prizes. He turned down a knighthood, and various literary awards—but in 1973 accepted the Nobel prize. David Marr wrote of biography of White in 1991. J. M. Coetzee, who was born in South Africa and was resident there when awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, now lives in Adelaide, South Australia, and is an Australian citizen. Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, 1977, is Australia's highest selling novel and one of the biggest selling novels of all time with around 30 million copies sold by 2009. Thomas Keneally wrote The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1972 and Schindler's Ark, 1982. This latter work was the inspiration for the film Schindler's List. Other notable Australian novels converted to celluloid include: Paul Brickhill's The Great Escape; Pamela Lyndon Travers' Mary Poppins; Morris West's