Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa, a gold mining town near Johannesburg, in 1923. Her parents were Jewish emigrants from London. She began writing at age nine when a heart condition limited her activity. She credits her isolation and her powers of observation for her success as a writer—traits that were evident to her even at this early age. At the private schools she attended, she was confronted with the omnipresence of racial discrimination. Even amidst the Catholic church, blacks were not afforded any semblance of status or respect, and the young intellectual wondered why. Gordimer began publishing stories at age fifteen which were generally concerned with racism and generally published in liberal magazines. With the assistance of Afrikaner poet Uys Krige and Sydney Saterstein, her agent, she soon began to publish in major literary magazines and American literary journals like The Yale Review...