by Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer, the 1991 Nobel laureate in literature, was born in a small mining town near Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1923. Her heritage makes her a minority within a minority on three counts: in a country sharply divided along racial and ethnic lines, she is white in a predominantly black land, of British heritage in a markedly Afrikaner white culture, and Jewish in a predominantly Christian population. Gordimer stands out politically as well. She has always been outspokenly liberal— even radical—in a white population that is profoundly conservative. Beginning with her first novel, Lying Days (1953), Gordimer has used her fiction to critique the racism of South African society, a racism epitomized by the official policy of apartheid (strict racial segregation). Her twelfth novel, in addition to as many short-story collections and several nonfiction works, The House Gun marks an important transition in...