Pearl S Buck A Biography

One of the most popular novelists of the twentieth century, winner of a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize for Literature and an active social and political campaigner, particularly in the field of women's issues and Asian-American relations, Pearl Buck has, until now, remained 'hidden in public view'. Best known, perhaps, as the prolific author of The Good Earth, Buck led a career which extended well beyond her eighty works of fiction and non-fiction and deep into the public sphere. In this critically acclaimed biography, Peter Conn retrieves Pearl Buck from the footnotes of literary and cultural history and reinstates her as a figure of compelling and uncommon significance in twentieth-century literary, cultural and political history.

A memoir from the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. “Not only [Buck’s] most important book, but—on many counts—her best book” (Kirkus Reviews). Often regarded as one of Pearl S. Buck’s most significant works, My Several Worlds is the memoir of a major novelist and one of the key American chroniclers of China. Buck, who was born to missionary parents in 1892, spent much of the first portion of her life in China, experiencing the Boxer Rebellion first hand and becoming involved with the society with an intimacy available to few outside observers. The book is not only an important reflection on that nation’s modern history, but also an account of her re-engagement with America and the intense activity that characterized her life there, from her prolific novel-writing to her loves and friendships to her work for abandoned children and other humanitarian causes. As alive with incident as it is illuminating in its philosophy, My Several Worlds is essential reading for travelers and readers alike. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author’s estate.

The story of a Chinese peasant and his passionate, dogged accumulation of land during famine, drought, and revolution.

In the 1930s, as her second marriage approaches, a brilliant and independent sculptor faces tensions between her art and everyday life in this novel by the author of The Good Earth. This Proud Heart narrates the experience of a gifted sculptor and her struggle to reconcile her absorbing career with society’s domestic expectations. Susan Gaylord is talented, loving, equipped with a strong moral sense, and adept at anything she puts her hand to, from housework to playing the piano to working with marble and clay. But the intensity of her artistic calling comes at a price, isolating her from other people—at times, even from her own family. When her husband dies and she remarries, she finds herself once again comparing the sacrifice of solitude to that of commitment. With a heroine who is naturalistic yet compellingly larger than life, This Proud Heart is incomparable in its sympathetic study of character. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author’s estate.

One of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary Americans, Pearl Buck was the first person to make China accessible to the West. She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China’s future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China’s building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party. Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood, famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearl’s life in China. "Asia was the real, the actual world," she said, "and my own country became the dreamworld." Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in The Good Earth. It was one of the last things she did before being finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way of telling that The Good Earth would sell tens of millions of copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans would do more than half a century later. No Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no Chinese had either. Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for ordinary Asian people— "translating my parents to me," said Hong Kingston, "and giving me our ancestry and our habitation." As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening.

A biography of the author's mother.