“Once Upon a Time”

• Genre: Fiction; short story; contemporary fairy tale
• Originally Published: 1989
• Reading Level/Interest: Grades 11-12; college/adult
• Structure/Length: Approx. 10 pages; approx. 20 minutes on audio
• Protagonist and Central Conflict: The main narrative is set up when the narrator, a writer, is approached about writing a children’s story but declines. After being awakened in the middle of the night, the narrator lies awake and imagines a “fairy tale” about a white family in South Africa that descends into racist paranoia and turns their home into a fortress, with disastrous consequences.
• Potential Sensitivity Issues: Apartheid in South Africa; racism; violent death of a child

Nadine Gordimer, Author

• Bio: 1923-2014; born into a middle-class Jewish family in Springs, South Africa; published her first story at age 15; wrote novels, essays, and short stories; addressed exile, alienation, and the effects of apartheid in many of her works; lectured and taught in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s; won the Booker Prize for her novel The Conservationist (1974); was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991
• Other Works: Face to Face (1949); The Lying Days (1953); Burger’s Daughter (1979); July’s People (1981); My Son’s Story (1990); Jump and Other Stories (1991); Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century (1999); The Pickup (2001); No Time like the Present (2012)