Cry, the Beloved Country Cry, the Beloved Country Cry, the Beloved Country is a novel by Alan Paton, published in 1948. American publisher Bennett Cerf remarked at that year's meeting of the American Booksellers Association that there had been "only three novels published since the first of the year that were worth reading… "Cry, The Beloved Country", "The Ides of March", and "The Naked and the Dead"." Two cinema adaptations of the book have been made, the first in 1951 and the second in 1995. The novel was also adapted as a musical called "Lost in the Stars" (1949), with a book by the
Cry, the Beloved Country affected by "native crime" while blacks suffer from social instability and moral issues due to the breakdown of the tribal system. It shows many of the problems with South Africa such as the degrading of the land reserved for the natives, which is sometimes considered to be the main theme, the disintegration of the tribal community, native crime, and the flight to urban areas. Another prevalent theme in "Cry, the Beloved Country" is the detrimental effects of fear on the characters and society of South Africa as indicated in the following quotation from the narrator in Chapter 12: Paton makes