Nadine Gordimer passed away yesterday at the at the age of 90. Fiction, she wrote—quoting the OED—is "'the action of feigning or inventing imaginary existences, events, states of things.' … The more I ponder this, the more it amazes me; the more I challenge it." Writers, she concluded, needed to be "guerrillas of the imagination." This piece was originally published in The New Republic on November 18, 1991.