![]() ![]() Paton's quietly moving autobiography builds slowly, as his life seems to have done, coming to a climax when, alone, on that 1946 trip abroad, "under the influence of powerful emotion," he started to write the book that was to sell millions of copies and make him famous. ![]() America would become for him "the country of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights," but already, thanks to Lincoln, it was the "shore dimly seen." In his autobiography, Towards the Mountain, Paton tells how in 1946, shortly after writing those first words of Cry, the Beloved Country, his novel about South Africa's racial ordeal, he stood in awe before the seated figure in the Lincoln Memorial. And Lincoln, whom he considered "the greatest of all the rulers of nations" was a star in his firmament, one that shone from far away on the "lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills." Born in Pietermaritzburg in the valley of the Umsindusi River in 1903, Alan Paton read more widely than Lincoln, but the Bible was at the core of what he learned and thought. SHAKESPEARE, BLACKSTONE and the Bible were Abraham Lincoln's main curriculum. Was from 196264 the Peace Corps special repres November 30, 1980 ![]()
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