Richard Rive, a well-known South African fiction writer, was born in Cape Town on 1 March 1931. His father was an African-American, and his mother a South African "coloured." He attended schools in the city and graduated in 1962 with a B.A. in English at the University of Cape Town. He had also trained as a teacher at Hewat Training College, Cape Town, and, in subsequent years, he earned degrees in literature from Columbia (M.A., 1966) and Oxford (Ph.D., 1974). His Oxford doctoral thesis was on the works of Olive Schreiner.

Rive spent most of his life in South Africa, a point worth noting, as virtually all black South African writers of his generation left the country as exiles during the 1950s or 1960s. Rive was a teacher or an instructor of teachers for most of his working life. He became head of the Department of English at Hewat College...