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    A Study Guide for Alan Paton's "Ha'Penny"
    A Study Guide for Alan Paton's "Ha'Penny"
    A Study Guide for Alan Paton's "Ha'Penny"
    Ebook37 pages27 minutes

    A Study Guide for Alan Paton's "Ha'Penny"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Alan Paton's "Ha'Penny," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535824460
    A Study Guide for Alan Paton's "Ha'Penny"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Alan Paton's "Ha'Penny" - Gale

      10

      Ha'penny

      Alan Paton

      1961

      Introduction

      Drawing on his real-life experience as a principal in a reformatory school in South Africa, Alan Paton creates a heart-wrenching short story called Ha'penny about a young boy in search of family love. Ha'penny is a twelve-year-old boy who has spent most of his life on the streets. After being caught stealing, he is sent to the reformatory where the narrator works. In the course of conversations with the boy, the narrator hears stories from Ha'penny that he has trouble believing.

      The narrator portrays himself as a compassionate man. He understands that many of the boys in the reformatory need affection and attention more than anything else. He especially enjoys working with the younger boys, who respond to a little compassion by improving their studies and staying out of trouble. However, despite the narrator's knowledge about the boys' psychological needs, he makes a grave mistake with Ha'penny. This mistake, the narrator believes, has dire consequences for Ha'penny, but the narrator cannot do anything to change those results. The best the narrator can do is to learn from his mistakes.

      Ha'penny was published in Paton's collection of short stories, Tales from a Troubled Land, in 1961. There are ten short stories in this collection. Most of them focus on incidents that occur in a South African reformatory, providing readers with a background of boys' lives spent in jail.

      Author Biography

      Much of Paton's writing draws from the details of his own life experiences, which occurred in South Africa. He was born on January 11, 1903, in the city of Pietermaritzburg, which is the second largest city in the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. His parents, James (a civil servant) and Eunice, were English settlers. Paton studied science at the University of Natal and in 1922 earned a certificate in teaching.

      For several years, Paton wrote poetry and fiction while teaching at local high schools and later at Pietermaritzburg College. However, his early writing dissatisfied him, and he threw much of it away. In 1928, Paton married Dorrie Lusted. They had two sons, David and Jonathan. In 1935, he gave up teaching and took the position of principal at the Diepkloof Reformatory. This change was to become an important part of the transformation in his writing.

      Paton began his new position

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