In addition, he wrote poetry all his life, though he did not think it worth collecting until a scholar, Colin Gardner, approached him for permission to do so when Paton was in his seventies. The resulting book,
Knocking on the Door: Shorter Writings (1975), revealed him as a talented poet, in addition to the prose it collected. In sum, though his reputation was founded on his first novel, his output was continuous and varied through a long writing career, and he is not just one of South Africa's most talented writers, but one of her most prolific too. Nor does his reputation rest solely on his writing, for before publishing his first novel he had achieved a considerable reputation as a theorist and practitioner of prison reform, and after he achieved literary eminence, he went on to become one of his country's best-known politicians, helping to found the South African Liberal Party and for ten years serving as its national president.
Alan Stewart Paton was born in Pietermaritzburg, the capital of Natal Province (now KwaZulu-Natal), on 11 January 1903. He was the eldest of four children, two boys and two girls. His mother, Eunice James Paton, was South African born of British stock; his father, James Paton, was a Scot who had immigrated to South Africa in 1895 and worked for the Supreme Court in Pietermaritzburg as a shorthand writer, a lowly post he kept all his working life.
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