South African · b. 1903
Alan Paton was a South African writer and anti-apartheid activist, best known for his deeply humane novel Cry, the Beloved Country, one of the most influential works to emerge from South Africa.
Alan Paton worked for years as the principal of a reformatory for young Black offenders, an experience that shaped his lifelong concern with justice, compassion, and racial reconciliation in South Africa.
His novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), published just as apartheid was being formalized, told the story of a Zulu pastor’s journey to Johannesburg in search of his son, and became an international bestseller and a powerful indictment of racial injustice. He also wrote Too Late the Phalarope and works of nonfiction.
A founder of the Liberal Party of South Africa, Paton combined his literary work with political activism against apartheid. He remains one of the country’s most beloved and morally serious writers.
by Alan Paton
Alan Paton's landmark 1948 novel of South Africa. A black Zulu pastor travels to Johannesburg to find his lost son, whose fate collides with that of a white landowner's son, in a lyrical, sorrowful story of fathers, country, and the gathering tragedy of apartheid.
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