Bill Pearson, an influential writer, academic, activist and champion of New Zealand literature, has died at his home in Herne Bay.
His output was small but many of his major works, characterised by careful scholarship and attention to detail, were ahead of their time, sayshis biographer, Paul Millar, senior lecturer at Victoria University's School of English, Film and Theatre.
Pearson's 1951 essay Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and Its Implications for the Artist, expressed the neglect many artists and intellectuals felt in a society that seemed conformist and provincial.
Pearson's only novel, Coal Flat (1963), which took 17 years to write, has been hailed as New Zealand's first major realist novel and one of the most influential works of its era.
He wrote essays on representations of Maori in creative writing and helped to support Maori students on campus. Rifled Sanctuaries (1984) looked at representations of the South Pacific and Pacific Islanders in fiction.
He edited Frank Sargeson's Collected Stories (1964) and wrote about the years Australian writer Henry Lawson spent in New Zealand.
William Harrison Pearson was born on January 18, 1922, in Greymouth, where his father worked as a railwayman.
He attended Greymouth Main School and Greymouth Technical High School before studying at Canterbury University College in 1939 and Dunedin Training College and the University of Otago 1940-41.
His experiences as an assistant teacher at Blackball School on the West Coast in 1942 provided the setting and many characters for Coal Flat.
During World War II he served in the Dental Corps in New Zealand and Fiji and with the Commonwealth occupation force in Japan.
Demobilised in July 1946, he returned to Canterbury, graduating with an MA in English in 1948. A close friend, and fellow editor of the student magazine, was the young poet James K. Baxter.
In 1949 Pearson enrolled as a doctoral candidate at Kings College, University of London, receiving his PhD in 1952. He began lecturing in the University of Auckland's English Department in 1954, retiring in 1986 as an associate professor.
Throughout his life, Pearson was an active supporter of left-wing political activities, civil liberties groups and the tangata whenua.
