Christina Stead is one of the great Australian writers of her generation. Rebecca West considered her to be 'one of the few people really original since the First World War. ' Stead's fiction has been compared to that of Balzac, Joyce, Ibsen and Tolstoy. THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN is a magnificent, heartrending novel of American family life, of the relations between parents and children, husbands and wives, set in Baltimore in the 1930s. Newsweek called it 'one of the best novels of this century. ' Elizabeth Hardwick has described it as 'a work of absolute originality. '