Life sentence: A biography of Herman Charles Bosman - Stephen Gray

The story of the life of the most famous and best loved writer in South Africa of the first half of the twentieth century. Bosman was born in the Cape in 1905, educated in Johannesburg and trained as a teacher sent to a backveld school—the source of his bestselling Mafeking Road. After a sensational trial, found guilty of murdering his step-brother in cold blood, he served his term in Pretoria Central Prison—the source of his classic Cold Stone Jug. During his years of exile in Paris and London and when he returned to South Africa to make a popular career as a sly commentator, he produced A Cask of Jerepigo. Before his untimely death in 1951, he became the country's best loved humorist.

In this biography, Bosman's extraordinary career is reconstructed from all the available documents and his papers, detail by detail, to present a revealing and explicit portrait of South Africa’s most controversial author.