Afrikaans prose writing made important strides in the 1920s and ’30s. In the genre of local realism, two novelists achieved success with their delineations of the folk of farms and villages— Jochem van Bruggen and Jan van Melle. The two foremost Romantic novelists were D.F. Malherbe, who wrote numerous prolix narratives on Biblical themes and South African pioneering history; and C.M. van...

...van Wyk (1906), a novel by J.H.H. de Waal, to more rigorously realistic historical works, such as those by Gustav Preller. Realism began to dominate Afrikaans prose, especially in the work of Jochem van Bruggen, who wrote a trilogy, the first part of which was Ampie, die natuurkind (1931; “Ampie, the Child of Nature”), a study of a poor white in South...