From a book-crammed North Shore bach, Frank Sargeson produced some of New Zealand's finest and most provocative literature. In The Press, Bruce Harding has written a superb appreciation of Sargeson’s life, full of intriguing facts:

• At the Takapuna Public Library, you can get the key to Sargeson’s unprepossessing fibrolite bach. You can wander around the small section, and poke around the shelves to your heart’s content.

• Sargeson's literary executor, Christine Cole Catley, formed the Sargeson Trust to preserve the bach as New Zealand's first literary museum.

• ‘Frank Sargeson’ was a pen name. His real name was Norris Frank Davey.

• Sargeson was born and raised in Hamilton, and described his birthplace as "The Grey Death, puritanism, wowserism gone most startlingly putrescent".

• In Wellington, police caught Sargeson in a compromising situation with the son of a prominent Christchurch painter. Sargeson was charged with indecently assaulting another male. At court, Sargeson

was viewed as an inexperienced victim of a sophisticated sexual predator (which he was not) … the older man got three five-year terms of imprisonment with hard labour, while the judge directed that Davey (Sargeson), convicted for indecent assault, would come up for sentence if called upon within the next two years for this offence.

• Sargeson’s first short story was published in the Australian Women's Mirror in 1933.

• Michael King, author of Frank Sargeson: A Life, notes that Sargeson

was the first major New Zealand writer to stay at home: the first living in New Zealand to appear in the prestigious Oxford Companion to English Literature: the first to elevate the preoccupations and speech patterns of ordinary New Zealanders to the status of great literature.

Harding quite rightly concludes:

We all surely owe Frank Sargeson a measure of respect, and there is no better way to honour Sargeson than to visit his lifelong home and creative workshop.