Part literary criticism, part literary detective story, this is the first major study of the work of Xavier Herbert, one of the great Australian novelists of the 20th century. It began as an attempt to answer two questions: Why did a novel as magnificent as Poor Fellow My Country receive so lukewarm a response from much of the critical establishment? And how did a man who sometimes wrote so badly ever learn to write such a novel? In exploring these questions, Sean Monahan provides perceptive new readings of Herbert's major works, and he looks in each of the earlier works for clues to solve the mystery of where the final great achievement came from. This engaging, accessible book makes a substantial and original contribution to an understanding of Herbert's fiction, while at the same time telling the human story of a writer's rocky road to creating a masterpiece.