Louis Stone

Stone was born in Leicester, England, baptized as William Lewis, son of William Stone, a basketmaker, and his wife Emma, née Tewkes. In 1884 the family emigrated to Brisbane, and then a year later, to Redfern in Sydney.

He grew up in poverty. His father, who was a marine, was largely absent.

Stone qualified as a primary school teacher in 1895 and had temporary teaching positions until he obtained a regular teaching job at Cootamundra. In 1901 Stone was transferred to South Wagga Wagga where he met Thomas Blamey who was influenced by Stone.

Around 1908 Stone married Abigail Allen and also began to write a novel Jonah, published in London in 1911.

According to Geoffrey Dutton, Stone was intimately familiar with the setting for Jonah, spending time in Waterloo and Paddy's Market, studying the local larrikins and their speech. The novel was warmly accepted by H. G. Wells, Galsworthy and George Bernard Shaw. It was not a financial success, until popularity was finally attained in the nineteen sixties and seventies after it was put on high school reading lists.File:Louis Stone 88.jpg H. M. Green, in his History of Australian literature, Vol.I (1984), described Stone as, "The most outstanding of the novelists of city life and one of the most outstanding of all the period's novelists."Green, H. M. (1984 revised edition) A history of Australian literature; pure and applied, Volume I, 1789-1923, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, p.717. {{ISBN|0207138257}} Green regards the most striking character in Jonah not the protagonist, Jonah Jones, but Mrs Yabsley, the enormous, illiterate old washerwoman, whom he describes as, "one of the most real and memorable characters in Australian literature."Green, p.724

In 1933, Jonah was republished by Percy Stephensen; it was also published in the United States as Larrikin. Jonah was adapted for a television series by the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1982;{{cite web|title= Jonah adapted by Eleanor Witcombe|publisher= Austlit|url=https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C402679|access-date= 22 October 2024}} it also provided the basis for the Sydney Theatre Company musical, Jonah Jones, in 1985.

Stone's second novel Betty Wayside was published in 1915.

He took six of his plays to London after World War I in the hope of having some of them staged, but without success. The only one to be staged in his lifetime was The Lap of the Gods which, produced by Gregan McMahon, had a one-week run in Sydney.

A character sketch of Louis Stone is given by Norman Lindsay in Bohemians of the Bulletin. Lindsay describes how the plot of Stone's last novel, Betty Wayside, was bowdlerized and thus fell into obscurity, leaving Stone with a sense of failure and a mental breakdown.

John Galsworthy in 1921 wrote, “I was much struck not long ago with Lewis Stone’s novel JONAH, a very fine piece of work. His second novel, too, is good. You have in him a writer whose full value Australia does not yet seem to have realised …”{{cite journal |last1=Stone |first1=Walter W. |title=The saga of a larrikin |journal=Biblionews and Australian Notes & Queries |date=December 1951 |volume=4 |issue=14}}

• Jonah (1911)
• Betty Wayside (1915)

• The Lap of the Gods (1923)

{{Reflist}}

• [http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/pdf/p00032.pdf SETIS - University of Sydney Jonah by Louis Stone]
• [http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/pdf/stobett.pdf SETIS - University of Sydney Betty Wayside by Louis Stone]
• {{Gutenberg author |id=1262| name=Louis Stone}}

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Category:1871 births

Category:1935 deaths

Category:Australian dramatists and playwrights

Category:Australian male novelists

Category:Australian people of English descent

Category:British emigrants to Australia