James McAuley

James McAuley was born in the Sydney suburb of Lakemba in 1917, and attended Fort Street High School and the University of Sydney. In 1943 James McAuley and Harold Stewart, then in Melbourne with the Army, concocted sixteen poems (or seventeen, if you count a coda as a separate poem) in the name of a fictional recently-dead poet, Ern Malley, and sent them to Angry Penguins, an experimental magazine edited by the 22-year-old Max Harris. Harris took the bait, published and praised the poems, and found his reputation as an editor wrecked when the hoax was exposed. McAuley founded the anti-Communist political and cultural journal Quadrant in 1956, and worked on it tirelessly until his death.

James McAuley died in 1976