Profile of Frank Hardy on Famous Like Me

Frank Hardy (1917–1994) was a left-wing novelist and writer from Australia.

Frank Hardy was born into a Roman Catholic family in 1917 and lived in Bacchus Marsh, west of Melbourne. In 1930 at the age of 13 he left school and started a series of manual jobs. As a result of his experiences during the Depression, Hardy joined the Communist Party of Australia in 1939. In 1942 he enlisted in the Army and was posted to Darwin. Initially editing and writing a unit newspaper for the Australian army, he was employed as an artist for the army journal Salt. He continued to work in journalism for most of his life.

His most famous work, Power Without Glory, initially published by Hardy himself with the assistance of Communist Party members, was filmed by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in the 1970s. The novel was a fictionalised version of the life of a Melbourne businessman, John Wren, and was set in the fictitious Melbourne suburb of Carringbush (based on the actual suburb Collingwood). In 1950, Hardy was arrested for criminal libel and had to defend the book in a celebrated case shortly after the publication of Power Without Glory. Hardy detailed the case in his book "The Hard Way".

Hardy was a member of the Realist Writers Group, who he represented at the Third World Youth Festival for Peace in Berlin.

Hardy's sister, Mary Hardy was a popular television personality in the 1970s in Australia.

Bibliography

• Legends from Benson's ValleyISBN 0140075046
• But the Dead Are Many: A Novel in Fugue Form, 1975, ISBN 0370105702
• Power Without Glory, 2000, ISBN 084640740X
• The Hard Way
• Outcasts of Foolgarah, 1971, ISBN 0858870002
• The Obsession of Oscar Oswald
• "The Four Legged Lottery" 1958 ISBN 0006145019

Books about Frank Hardy

• Frank Hardy and the Literature of Commitment, edited by Paul Adams & Christopher Lee is published by The Vulgar Press in North Carlton, Vic. in 2003
• Frank Hardy and the Making of Power without Glory, Pauline Armstrong (Melbourne University Press)ISBN 0-522-84888-5
• The Stranger From Melbourne: Frank Hardy - A Literary Biography 1944 - 1975, Paul Adams, University of West Australia Press, 1999 ISBN 1876268239

External link

Newspicture of Hardy leaving court after libel trial in 1950

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