Athol Harold Lannigan Fugard was born June 11, 1932 in Middelburg, a small village in the semidesert Karoo region of South Africa. His mother, Elizabeth Magdalena Potgieter Fugard, was an Afrikaner who could trace her ancestry back to the earliest Dutch settlers of 1652. His father, Harold David Fugard, was a South African with English and Irish roots. At his grandmother's request, the boy who would one day become his country's most famous playwright was named Athol after a former British governor of South Africa, the Earl of Athlone.

When he was three years old, Fugard's family moved to Port Elizabeth, where the playwright has since spent most of his life. In his introduction to Boesman and Lena and Other Plays, published in 1978, Fugard describes his adopted hometown as "an almost featureless industrial port on the Indian Ocean. . .assaulted throughout the year by strong southwesterly and easterly winds." Port...