A short life of the author
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) was born on 20 November 1923 in Springs, a gold-mining town on the East Rand of the Transvaal, the daughter of a Latvian-Jewish watchmaker and an English-born mother. She was a precocious reader who published her first story at fifteen and knew by her teens that writing about South Africa — its racial injustice, its moral complexities, and the daily textures of life under apartheid — would be her life’s work.
Life and Career
Gordimer briefly attended the University of the Witwatersrand but did not take a degree. She began publishing stories in South African magazines in the 1940s and attracted international attention with her first novel, The Lying Days (1953). Over the next sixty years she published fifteen novels and more than a dozen story collections, an output of remarkable consistency and evolving ambition.
Her major novels chart the history of South Africa from the entrenchment of apartheid through the liberation struggle to the post-apartheid era: A World of Strangers (1958), The Late Bourgeois World (1966), The Conservationist (1974, joint winner of the Booker Prize), Burger’s Daughter (1979), July’s People (1981), My Son’s Story (1990), None to Accompany Me (1994), and The Pickup (2001). Several of these novels were banned by the South African censors: A World of Strangers, The Late Bourgeois World, and Burger’s Daughter were all prohibited at various times.
Gordimer was a founding member of the Congress of South African Writers and an active participant in the anti-apartheid movement. She hid manuscripts for the African National Congress, testified in defence of accused activists, and used her international platform to campaign against the regime. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, “who through her magnificent epic writing has — in the words of Alfred Nobel — been of very great benefit to humanity.”
She continued writing until her death on 13 July 2014 in Johannesburg. She was ninety.
Major Works and Themes
Gordimer’s fiction examines the moral distortions that apartheid imposed on all South Africans — white and Black, liberal and conservative, complicit and resistant. Her white characters are trapped in a system they benefit from but cannot endorse; her Black characters navigate a world of constraint and resistance. The tension between private life and political reality is her central subject.
The Conservationist (1974) follows a wealthy white industrialist who owns a farm in the Transvaal; the discovery of a dead Black man buried on his property becomes a symbol of the unacknowledged claims of the dispossessed.
Burger’s Daughter (1979) is perhaps her finest novel: the story of Rosa Burger, daughter of a martyred Communist activist, who must decide whether to continue her father’s political commitment or pursue her own private life. It was banned in South Africa on publication.
July’s People (1981) imagines a near-future revolution in which a white liberal family is forced to take refuge with their Black servant, July — a reversal of power that exposes the assumptions underlying even the most well-meaning white liberalism.
The Short Stories
Gordimer’s short stories — collected in volumes from The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952) to Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2007) — are where many critics locate her finest writing. She published over two hundred stories over six decades, and the best of them — “The Moment Before the Gun Went Off,” “Town and Country Lovers,” “Something Out There,” “A Chip of Glass Ruby” — achieve a concentrated moral intensity that the novels sometimes sacrifice to panoramic ambition. Her stories show the daily texture of apartheid life: the small accommodations, the sudden eruptions of violence, the moments when the political order reveals itself in an apparently private encounter. She belongs, as a short-story writer, in the company of Chekhov, Mansfield, and Munro.
Gordimer and Coetzee
Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee are the two towering figures of South African fiction — both Nobel laureates, both white South Africans writing about the moral catastrophe of apartheid, but fundamentally different in method and temperament. Gordimer was a realist, politically engaged, committed to representing the social world as accurately and comprehensively as possible. Coetzee was an allegorist, philosophically oriented, drawn to fable and abstraction. Gordimer stayed in South Africa after apartheid; Coetzee emigrated to Australia. Their relationship was respectful but cool — each acknowledged the other’s importance while clearly regarding their own approach as more truthful.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Gordimer was recognised throughout her career as one of the most important living novelists. Her work belongs alongside that of Coetzee, Achebe, and Ngũgĩ in the literature of colonialism and its aftermath. She demonstrated that a white writer could address racial injustice with authority and moral seriousness — not by speaking for Black South Africans but by relentlessly examining the white liberal conscience and finding it wanting.
Collecting Gordimer
Gordimer is collected primarily in her South African and British first editions. South African editions, published by Jonathan Ball and others, are the true first editions for most titles and are scarcer than the UK or US editions.
The Lying Days (1953, Gollancz, London) — her first novel — is the scarcest title. Fine copies in jacket bring $500–$2,000.
The Conservationist (1974) and Burger’s Daughter (1979) are the most sought-after titles, as the novels on which her reputation principally rests. Fine copies in jacket bring $200–$800.
Signed Gordimer material is available. She was a cooperative signer, and signed copies of her major novels are regularly offered. Letters and manuscripts, when they surface, command moderate prices.