Selected Stories

by William Plomer

In his introduction Professor Stephen Gray writes: "This collection brings back into print for the first time in many years all the major African stories Plomer wrote from 1926-33, and hence most of his important short fiction. Thereafter I have chosen a few representative stories of his later periods, and allowed the collection to close with his final story of 1956...The return of these stories in the Plomer canon to the reader, in Southern Africa and elsewhere, should help to establish his status more firmly than ever, and find a new generation of readers who, since his death in 1973, might have heard - but are not really sure - that William Plomer is one of the finest and most influential short-story writers South Africa has produced.

195 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

William Charles Franklyn Plomer CBE (he pronounced the surname as ploomer) was a South African and British author, known as a novelist, poet and literary editor. He was educated mostly in the United Kingdom, but described himself as an "Anglo-African-Asian".

He became famous in the Union of South Africa with his first novel, Turbott Wolfe, which had inter-racial love and marriage as a theme. He was co-founder of the short-lived literary magazine Voorslag ("Whiplash") with two other South African rebels, Roy Campbell and Laurens van der Post; it promoted a racially equal South Africa.

He spent the period from October 1926 to March 1929 in Japan, where he was friendly with Sherard Vines. There, according to biographers, he was in a same-sex relationship with a Japanese man. He was never openly gay during his lifetime; at most he alluded to the subject.

He then moved to England, and through his friendship with his publisher Virginia Woolf, entered the London literary circles. He became a literary editor, for Faber and Faber, and was a reader and literary adviser to Jonathan Cape, where he edited a number of Ian Fleming's James Bond series. Fleming dedicated Goldfinger to Plomer. He was active as a librettist, with Gloriana, Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son for Benjamin Britten.