David Watt Ballantyne has been described as “the forgotten man of New Zealand literature”. He burst on to the literary scene in 1948 at 23, the earliest of the young post-war New Zealand writers to have a first novel published – not in New Zealand, but in the United States. This was
The Cunninghams, a grittily realistic treatment of life in New Zealand in the Great Depression of the 1930s, critically acclaimed in America, greeted with puzzlement and suspicion in his native land, but now regarded as a New Zealand classic. He did not publish another novel until 1963.
This was not for want of effort. During this 15-year hiatus, he completed the drafts of five novels which he could not get published. When finally his second novel, The Last Pioneer, appeared, it had a lukewarm critical
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Citation: Reid, Bryan. "David Ballantyne". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 April 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=233, accessed 25 November 2024.]
