Steele Rudd Biography

Australian short-story writer and novelist, born Arthur Hoey Davis in Drayton, Queensland; he received a rudimentary education and worked as a shearer before taking clerical employment in Brisbane in 1885. He took the name Steele Rudd for the spuriously autobiographical stories about the typically Australian Rudd family which he began contributing to the Sydney Bulletin in 1895. Following the success of On Our Selection (1899), his first collection of sympathetically humorous stories about the Rudds and their smallholding, he produced some fifteen books about the Rudds, which include Dad in Politics (1908), Grandpa's Selection (1916), The Old Homestead (1917), and Me and th'Son (1924). Subsequent adaptations of On Our Selection for the stage (1912) and cinema (1932) were also highly successful. Among Rudd's novels, which are generally considered inferior to his shorter works, are The Romance of Runnibede (1927) and The Green Homestead (1934). His other collections of sketches and stories include On Emu Creek (1923) and the substantially autobiographical The Miserable Clerk (1926).