It set Elizabeth Smither dancing, it enabled Maurice Gee to become a fulltime writer, it allowed Marilyn Duckworth to hire a babysitter. Barry Crump said, 'The New Zealand Literary Fund came across with some dough to help me write this. Not a bad bunch.' The New Zealand Literary Fund was a small amount of public money skilfully dispensed over forty years to hundreds of writers and publishers. Unobtrusively but persistently, the fund and the dedicated men and women who allotted its largesse laid the foundations of the literary culture we enjoy today. From a small gesture of government patronage in the postwar world, it slowly grew, expanding its reach, enlarging its ambitions and acquiring partners. This is its story. The Deepening Stream features strong personalities, from poets to politicians, and their dramas and disappointments, hopes and humiliations. It charts the growing confidence of New Zealand writers and the infrastructure supporting them, and gives vivid pictures of individual writers, fledgling publishers and struggling magazines. It recounts how New Zealand readers gradually came to value their own literature.