Alan Paton
1 book analyzed
Biography
Alan Paton (1903–1988) was a white South African who worked for over a decade as principal of the Diepkloof Reformatory for Black boys near Johannesburg. He saw daily what urbanization and the pass system did to young Black men — the exact machinery that produces Absalom's trajectory. He began Cry, the Beloved Country in 1946 while traveling in Norway on a Churchill Fellowship, writing it in spare moments in hotel rooms, completing it in San Francisco. It was published in 1948 — the same year the National Party came to power and formalized apartheid. Paton founded the Liberal Party of South Africa, which called for universal suffrage, and was for decades under surveillance, his passport confiscated. He died in 1988, before the end of apartheid.