People

Born in 1923 to Jewsih immigrant parents in the South African mining town of Springs,
Nadine Gordimer began writing early, from the beginning taking the pathologies and
everyday realities of a radically divided society as her subject. She still lives in South
Africa, in Johannesburg. Her decision to remain in the country through the years of
political repression has reflected her commitment to her subject, to the society to which
she feels she belongs, and to her vision of a postapartheid future. Gordimer has drawn
criticism both for her apparent lack of attention to feminism in favor of race issues and
for the wholeness and unfashionable completeness of her novels--their plottedness,
meticulous scene painting, fully realized characters. However, the searching symbolism
and complexity of her narratives generally work against such judgments. A prominent
feature of her writing is to give a number of different perspectives on a situation, in some
cases most poignantl...