Alan Paton Biography

Authors and Artists for Young Adults on Alan Paton

In a cathedral in Norway in 1946, Alan Paton sat looking at a rose window. "There was still enough light in the sky to see its magnificent design and colors," wrote Paton in Towards the Mountain, his autobiography. "I was in the grip of powerful emotion, not directly to do with the cathedral and the rose window, but certainly occasioned by them. I was filled with an intense homesickness, for home and wife and sons, and for my far off country." Paton went back to his hotel and wrote the following sentences: "There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it." Paton kept writing, and the sentences stretched out into what would become a classic South African novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. According to William Minter, writing in New York Times Book Review, the 1948 publication of the book "transformed" Paton "overnight into South Africa's most celebrated writer." Carol Iannone of American Scholar explained, "Within a few years of its publication in 1948, it had become a worldwide best-seller and was eventually translated into twenty, languages." In 1988, "it had sold over fifteen million copies and was still selling at the rate of one hundred thousand copies a year."

Iannone wrote that the novel takes up a particular moment in South African history: "The depression and war had passed.

Read the rest of this Biography with our Alan Paton Access Pass.