Nobel Prize—winning author J. M. Coetzee, descendant of seventeenth-century Dutch settlers, was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940. His well-educated parents promoted an interest in learning in the young Coetzee, who loved to read books. When it came time to enter university, Coetzee studied both mathematics and English. Upon graduating with honors from the University of Cape Town, Coetzee moved to England where he found work as a computer programmer. His love of literature had not diminished, however, and two years after marrying Phillipa Jubber, in 1963, he was accepted as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1969, he received his doctorate in English, linguistics, and Germanic languages.

Coetzee would go on to teach literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY) for the next three years. He had wanted to stay in the United States...