Alex La Guma Biography
(1925–85), New Age, A Walk in the Night, And a Threefold Cord, The Stone Country
South African novelist, born in Cape Town. He was arrested in the Treason Trial of 1956–61, partly as a consequence of his activities with the Communist Party and the Coloured People's Congress, and from 1962 to 1965 he was under continual house arrest, having previously been on the staff of New Age, a progressive newspaper. A Walk in the Night (1962) is a grimly realistic, and intensely psychological, short novel. It evokes one desperate and fear-ridden night in the life of Michael Adonis, a recently dismissed young factory worker, as he angrily prowls the streets of District Six—a multiracial ghetto—in Cape Town. Other novels include And a Threefold Cord (1964), also set in District Six; The Stone Country (1967), a stark depiction of conflicts among political, and other, prisoners and their warders; In the Fog of the Season's End (1972), and Time of the Butcherbird (1979), both of which deal with overt political resistance to apartheid, and its tragic consequences.
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Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern FictionEncyclopedia of Literature: Knole Kent to Mary Lavin Biography