‘The Coca-Cola Kid’ won the Henry Lawson Short Story Prize 1970, ‘Dell Goes into Politics’ won the State of Victoria Short Story Prize 1970.
I thank Don Anderson, Michael Wilding, Stephen Knight and Gillian Burnett for critical and other support and Carol Buck for editorial assistance and for acting as my American cultural adviser.
The New South Wales Government gave me a grant for six months which permitted this book to be finished in an atmosphere of economic security.
Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator, and became a full-time writer in the 1970s. He has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays, and edited many collections of writing.
Forty-Seventeen was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in The New York Times and was named Book of the Year by The Age and ‘moral winner’ of the Booker Prize by the London magazine Blitz. Grand Days, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier’s Award for Fiction. Dark Palace won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.
Moorhouse has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
Futility and Other Animals
The Americans, Baby
The Electrical Experience
Tales of Mystery and Romance
Conference-ville
The Everlasting Secret Family and Other Secrets Forty-Seventeen
Grand Days
Dark Palace
Cold Light
Room Service
Lateshows
Loose Living
The Inspector-General of Misconception
NON-FICTION
Days of Wine and Rage
Martini: A Memoir
COLLECTED WORKS
Selected Stories (also published as The Coca-Cola Kid)
FILM AND TELEVISION SCRIPTS
Between Wars (feature film)
Coca-Cola Kid (feature film)
Everlasting Secret Family (feature film)
Conference-ville (telemovie)
Time’s Raging (with Sophia Turkiewicz, telemovie)
The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain (docudrama)
Coast to Coast 1973
State of the Art
Fictions 88
A Steele Rudd Selection
Prime Ministers of Australia
The Best Australian Stories 2004
The Best Australian Stories 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
The Americans, Baby
9781742746548
Copyright © Frank Moorhouse, 1972
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
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First published by Angus and Robertson in 1972
This Vintage edition published in 2008
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Moorhouse, Frank, 1938-.
The Americans, baby.
ISBN 978 1 74051 137 7 (pbk.).
I. Title.
A823.3
Cover design by Gayna Murphy, Greendot Design