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Books by Peter
Abrhams
Mine
Boy /
Wild Conquest
/
Tell Freedom; Memories of
Africa /
The Path of Thunder
/
A Wreath for Udomo /
Return to Goli
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Bio Sketch
PETER HENRY ABRAHAMS
Peter Abrahams (Mar. 19, 1919;
author), an adopted citizen of Britain, makes his home in
Essex, but his spiritual home is South Africa, where he was born
and to which he returns on frequent visits.
“I am emotionally involved in South Africa,” he says,
“Africa is my beat.” South
Africa is the scene of Abrahams’ five novels and of his
stirring autobiography Tell Freedom; Memories of
Africa. As an
artist, of course, Abrahams knows no national boundaries, but as
a non-white who grew up in the slums and black ghettos of
Johannesburg, he has a strong sense of dedication to a cause.
“If I am ever liberated from this bondage of racialism,
there are some things much more exciting to me, objectively, to
write about. … But
this world has such a social orientation, and I am involved in
this world and I can’t cut myself off. …
James Henry Abrahams, the
author’s father, was an Ethiopian.
Angelina DuPlessis, his mother, was colored, which he
defines as “the South African word for the half-caste
community that was a by-product of the early contact between
black and white.” She
was of Negro-French origin.
Peter Henry Abrahams was born in Johannesburg on March 19,
1919. His father
died when he was a little boy, and the childhood which he
describes in
Tell Freedom was a hard one.
There was the endless struggle against poverty, common to
so many people all over the world, but added to this was the
spirit-crushing atmosphere of racialism, bettering conditions.
What emerges so strikingly from
Tell Freedom,
indeed, is the sense of compassion and hope that filled the
lives of Abrahams and his family in the face of these formidable
barriers.
Peter went to work before he
went to school. He
sold firewood, worked for a tinsmith, cleaned rooms in a hotel,
carried packages—did whatever odd jobs he could find—all
this before he was ten years old.
Education came later for him, but when it came, he
received it with an eagerness that enabled him to make up for
lost time and race ahead. After
three years in school he had discovered Charles and Mary
Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and the poems of John
Keats. As he writes
in Tell Freedom: “With Shakespeare and poetry, a new
world was born.”
With the aid of a
scholarship Abrahams attended St. Peter’s College in
Johannesburg and the Teachers’ Training College at Petersburg.
At college the world opened up rapidly for the boy.
He edited the college magazine and began writing and
publishing verse in the Bantu World.
After graduating from college in 1938, Abrahams taught
for a year in Cape Town and then worked briefly in Durban as a
magazine editor. His
dream was to go to England, but the chances of his earning the
money for passage appeared hopeless.
Then in 1939 he got a job as a ship’s stoker and spent
the next two years traveling around the world.
Ultimately this led him to England and freedom, and he
has given all his time and energy since then to writing.
Abrahams wrote his first
story at eleven. “It
was a Western based largely on my Saturday excursions to a local
‘bioscope’ where Tom Mix, Joe Bonomo, Yakima Canut, and Buck
Jones were our great heroes and only the ‘dames’ interfered
and slowed down the pace and action that thrilled us.”
His adult writing, however, took on a more serious and
realistic note. Dark
Testament (G. Allen), a collection of short stories, was
published in England in 1942; Song of the City (Crisp), a
novel, followed in 1945. His
third book was
Mine Boy (Crisp), published in England in
1946 and by Knopf in the United States in 1955.
In
The Path of Thunder (Harper, 1948) Abrahams had
his hero an educated Negro who returns to his native South
African village with ideas of reform and equality and inevitably
clashes with the white population.
Wild Conquest
(Harper, 1950) was an historical
novel treating the great northward trek of the Boers in the
1830’s and their conflicts with the Africans.
With
Tell Freedom
(Knopf, 1954), his autobiography, and
A Wreath for Udomo(Knopf, 1956), a novel, Abrahams has made his most effective
contribution so far to world understanding of the racial
problems of Africa. Tell Freedom “adds an essential dimensions to the
African picture,” Melville J. Herskovits wrote in the Nation
(August 21, 1954). “Not
since [Alan] Paton’s
Cry the Beloved Country has there
been such an enormous and detailed rang of discriminating
reporting as in this book,” wrote Roi Ottley in Saturday
Review (August 14, 1954).
A Wreath for Udomo is
a powerful story of a brilliant Negro, educated in London, who
returns to Africa to govern his own people.
His failure and his martyrdom are as much the results of
the tragic misunderstandings among his own people as of the
prejudices of the white man.
Harvey Curtis Webster in the Saturday Review (May
26, 1956) called this “probably … the most perceptive novel
that has been written about the complex interplay between
British imperialism and African nationalism and tribalism.”
Abrahams has also
published a work of reportage
Return to Goli
(Faber,
1953). He is currently at work on a book about the island of
Jamaica, commissioned by the British and Jamaican governments.
The book will be part of the Corona Library.
Travel, gardening,
tennis, walking, and “meeting and talking with people” are
the author’s favorite recreations.
In 1942 Abrahams married Dorothy Pennington.
Their marriage was dissolved in 1948.
On June 1, 1948 he married Daphne Elizabeth Miller, an
artist. They have
three children, Anne, Aron, and Naomi.
Abrahams is five feet seven inches tall and weighs about
150 pounds. He is a
member of the Society of Authors and of the International PEN.
His church affiliation is Anglican.
References
Newsweek
44:83 Ag 9 ’54 por
San
Bernardino (California) Sun Telegram Ja 22 ’56
Toledo
(Ohio) Blade Ja 15 ’56 por
Author’s
and Writer’s Who’s Who (1948–49)
Cassell’s
Encyclopaedia of World Literature (1954)
Source: Current Biography Reprinted from the Wilson Library
Bulletin Sept. 1957. * *
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