American · b. 1933
Norman Rush set his fiction in Botswana, where he served as a Peace Corps director. "Mating" (1991) won the National Book Award—a woman anthropologist pursues a utopian social theorist into the Kalahari. Rush's sentences are long and his intellect is on display; his characters think for a living. "Whites" collects earlier stories. "Mortals" (2003) continued his African investigations.