André Brink, responding enthusiastically to the award of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature to fellow South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, asserted "ever since the publication of Cry, the Beloved Country in the fateful year of 1948, much of the international preoccupation with apartheid has in fact been stimulated and directed by South African fiction." If one includes in the category of fiction, along with Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, the writings of the black "protest" poets meant for oral delivery at mass meetings, the plays of Athol Fugard, and the collective creations of black theater groups, Brink's claim seems in no way inflated. His own contributions to South African literature, in English and Afrikaans alike, have been immense: as creative artist and as translator, in the novel and, in Afrikaans, the drama; and as satirist, literary critic, theorist, and cultural commentator, he has consistently been a prolific...