Nadine Gordimer, novelist and short story writer, was born in Springs, South Africa,
in
1923. She spent her childhood in Transvaal, and began writing at an early age, publishing
her first short story, "Come Again Tomorrow," when she was 15. At 21,
Gordimer briefly attended Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg where she was exposed
to
the social and political atmosphere of South Africa, which would become the focus
of her
works. Gordimer married twice--first in 1949 to G. Gavron, with whom she had one daughter,
and then to Reinhold Cassirer in 1954. They had one son.
Gordimer remained in Johannesburg and her works reflect the racially turbulent themes
of
South Africa's history. She published fifteen novels. Her first was the
semi-autobiographical The Lying Days (1953), which was followed by A World of Strangers (1958), Occasion for Loving (1963), The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of Honour (1971), The Conservationist (1974), Burger's Daughter (1979), July's People (1981), A Sport of Nature (1987), My Son's Story (1990),
None to Accompany Me (1994),
The House Gun (1998),
The Pickup (2001),
Get a Life (2005), and
No Time Like the Present (2012).
Gordimer's short stories have been published in various magazines such as the New Yorker, Harpers, and the Yale Review. They have also been published in several collections,
including Face to Face (1949), Friday's Footprint (1960), Jump: And Other Stories (1991), Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2007), and Life Times: Stories (2011).
Nadine Gordimer received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She died on July
14,
2014.
Scope and Contents
The Nadine Gordimer collection, 1958-1965, consists of fourteen corrected typescripts,
including thirteen short stories and one novel. There is no material relating to Gordimer's
personal life or correspondence. The works are arranged alphabetically.
The collection contains material relating to Gordimer's early work as a South African
novelist and short story writer. It includes a draft of Gordimer's second novel, A World of Strangers (1958), and the thirteen short stories that
have been collected and published in Friday's Footprint (1960) and
Not for Publication (1965).
As well as providing Gordimer's impressions of South Africa, the corrected typescripts
offer insight into Gordimer's writing process. A World of Strangers is prefaced by an author's plan that outlines
the novel's plot.
