Nadine Gordimer

From Philosopedia

Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 - )

Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in Springs, Gauteng, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. She is the daughter of Isidore and Nan (Myers) Gordimer, her father a Jewish watchmaker from Lithuania and her Jewish mother was from London.

She was educated partly at a Catholic convent school but mostly was taught at home by her mother. Gordimer attended Witwatersrand University but did not complete a degree. She since has received honorary doctorates from Yale University, Harvard University, Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, the University of Leuven in Belgium, the University of York in England, the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and Cambridge University in England.

In 1948, she moved to Johannesburg. In 1954 she married Reinhold Cassirer, and their children are Oriane and Hugo.

Gordimer, an atheist, has stated that her father was a "mystery" to her. In her Paris Review interview, she wrote that he "went through the whole Jewish pogrom syndrome," and wondered whether this "timid" man did not burn himself out while emigrating.

In 1978, Gordimer was elected as a Foreign Honorary members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Works

Face to Face (1949, collections)

The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952, collections)

The Lying Days (1953, novel)

Six Feet of the Country" (1956, collections)

A World of Strangers (1958, novel)

Occasion for Loving (1963, novel)

The Late Bourgeois World (1966, novel)

Southern African Writing Today (1967, with Lionel Abrams)

A Guest of Honour (1970, novel) - James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1973)

Livingston's Companions (1971, collections)

On the Mines (1973, non-fiction)

The Black Interpreters (1973, literary criticism)

The Conservationist (1974, novel) - Booker Prize for Fiction, England

Selected Stories (1975, collections)

Some Monday for Sure (1976, collections)

Burger's Daughter (1979, novel)

A Soldier's Embrace (1980, collections)

July's People (1981, novel)

Something Out There (1984, collections)

Lifetimes Under Apartheid (1986, non-fiction)

A Sport of Nature (1987, novel)

The Essential Gesture (1988, collections)

My Son's Story (1990, novel)

Crimes of Conscience (1991, collections)

Jump (1991, collections)

Three In A Bed (1991, collections)

Why Haven't You Written, Selected Stories 1950-1972 (1991)

None to Accompany Me (1994, novel)

Writing and Being (1995, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

The House Gun (1998, novel)

Living in Hope and History: Notes From Our Century (1999, essays)

The Pickup (2001, novel)

Loot and Other Stories (2003, short stories)

Telling Tales (2004, Editor)

Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2007)