In the following essay, King provides an overview of Gordimer's work and discusses the significance that race has played in her writing.

Although Nadine Gordimer has in recent years written and published more novels than collections of short stories, the range and sequence of the short stories offer some revealing glimpses of her understanding of what living in South Africa has entailed. It is certainly true that in her novels a fuller and more comprehensive moral vision is presented. Reading the stories, though, is like a suburban train journey where all sorts of fascinating scenes of life are available for a moment before the train's onward movement denies you the chance of complete vision. You as voyeur have the option of leaving the vision in its fragmented completeness, or else of completing the story yourself in your mind.

In this study I intend looking only at those...