Such Separate Creatures

by James Courage, Charles Brasch (Editor)

It was with the ending of the war, those more
than six years of darkness, privation and fear,
that Courage at last found himself as a writer,
when he was in his early forties. The terrible
constriction and oppressiveness of the nineteen
thirties, heavy with the growing threat of war,
had been resolved. The relief, the release, were
enormous.

It was then that Courage wrote, or at least
published, the first story in which his imagination
is engaged. "Uncle Adam Shot a Stag", which
appeared in 1945 in English Story, the leading
annual collection of short stories. He had discovered
his own New Zealand: the discovery had
been recognized. After that there was no year
in which he was not writing, and only two years
in which he did not publish, either stories or a
novel, or both. His second novel, The Fifth
Child, came out from Constable in 1948, and
thereafter he published a novel every second year
until 1956; the two last came out in 1959 and
1961. New Zealand acknowledged him when
his story "A Smile on Sunday" appeared in 1947
in the second number of Landfall.

206 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1973