"The death of Henry Lawson marked the close of the period in Australian literature which began with Henry Kendall. While living, Lawson had many imitators, but no peers; with his death we turned a page to which there can be no additions. He belonged to a past of struggle, pain, and triumph, when the country was in the making. Others will use those days to give their work background of colour and romance; but there can be none to walk where he walked, none to see with his eyes... With every decade that appeal must increase; for, reading Lawson, our children's children will hear the living voice of those who laid the foundations of all they prize and love." The 'Poetical Works of Henry Lawson is a collection of poems by the famed nineteenth century Australian writer and poet, known for his prolific descriptions of Australian society in the colonial period.

Biography of a Book traces the life of an iconic Australian literary work in the lead-up to, and for a century after, its initial publication: Henry Lawson's 1896 collection While the Billy Boils. Paul Eggert follows Lawson's gradual development of a pared-back bush realism in the early 1890s, as he struggled to forge a career, writing short stories and sketches for the newspapers. Lawson's famous collection came out at a decisive moment for the development of a fully professional Australian literary publishing industry, then in its infancy in Sydney. The volume's editing, design and production were collaborative events that changed the feel and nature of Lawson's writing. He had to give ground on his texts and their sequencing. The collection went on to be reprinted and repackaged countless times. Its production and reception histories act like a geological cross-section, revealing the contours of successive cultural formations in Australia. In unravelling the life of Lawson's classic work Eggert's book-historical approach challenges and clarifies established understandings of crucial moments in Australian literary history and of Lawson himself

This book offers the first in-depth examination of a distinctive and community-based tradition rich with larger-than-life heroes, vivid occupational language, humor, and unblinking encounters with birth, death, nature, and animals in the poetry.