Athol Fugard (Dictionary of World Biography: The 20th Century)

Early Life

Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard was born on June 11, 1932, in Cape Province, South Africa, to Elizabeth Magdalena Potgieter, who ran a boarding-house, and Harold David Fugard, a jazz pianist. Fugard remembers his father as a man of many contradictions: Although gentle by nature, the elder Fugard was “full of pointless, unthought-out prejudices”; while distant from his children, he shared with young Athol a love for horror films, pulp fiction, and comic books. Mrs. Fugard, on the other hand, was a capable woman who supported her family through her management first of...

[The entire page is 2742 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the: