In the essay below, Matlaw compares the generic methods of Cry, the Beloved Country to Maxwell Anderson's Lost in the Stars (1949), a stage adaptation of Paton's novel, demonstrating how each work uses such formal strategies as narrative, stylistic devices, and characterization that achieve "very similar effects."

In the following essay, first printed in 1948 in America magazine, Gardiner commends Paton's artistic treatment of racial tensions in Cry, the Beloved Country, especially in comparison to contemporary trends in fiction.

The emotional impact of Cry, the Beloved Country is achieved, first of all and most consistently, by Paton's stylistic understatement, by his use and reuse of a few simple, almost stilted, formal phrases. Is it heavy? Jarvis asks Stephen Kumalo when the latter haltingly and painfully reveals his identity as the father of the murderer of Jarvis' son. Kumalo's reply echoes and reechoes the adjective: It is very heavy, umnumzana. It is the heaviest thing of all my years … This thing...

In the following excerpt, Prescott opines that Cry, the Beloved Country is among the "great novels," praising Paton's artistic treatment of the story's themes.

Ever since he published "Cry, The Beloved Country," a book which so passionately brought to the attention of the outside world the plight of the bitterly exploited native population of South Africa, Alan Paton has come to seem one of the few voices in that somber and menaced country that still speak out for liberal values…. Mr. Paton, to put it mildly, is not a dangerous revolutionary, nor, to put it as simply and respectfully as possible, is he a writer of great originality. He writes ...

[Paton's Cry, the beloved country] is not merely a social record: it is the deeply imagined story of an individual life. And Paton has had to devise a language to tell the story in, for the simple Zulu parson who is the protagonist does not deal in the current coin of modern English speech. So that the literary question was as demanding as the historical one; the political act cannot be separated from the work of art. Now, after thirty years, comes Ah, but your land is beautiful, with similar themes ...

[Alan Paton] started what seems to me almost a new era in South African writing. What is interesting about it is that other people had written not much less competently the sort of thing which Paton wrote in Cry, the Beloved Country, but somehow they did not set in motion the kind of cycle which Paton did. If you know Cry, the Beloved Country, you will know that it is a rather simple story. It is a narration of a black man in contact with a society which he doesn't really understand—a society ...