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.

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.

FIGHTING ANGEL PORTRAIT OF A SOUL Pearl S. Buck a JOHN DAY book REYNAL HITCHCOCK NEW YORK By Pearl S. Buc FIGHTING ANGEL THE EXILE A HOUSE DIVIDED THE MOTHER THE FIRST WIFE AND OTHER STORIES SONS THE GOOD EARTH EAST WIND WEST WIND ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS SHUI HU CHUAN TRANSLATED FROM THE CHINESE FIGHTING ANGEL, the biography of the authors father, is a com panion volume to THE EXILE, which is a biography of her mother Together they form a work to he en tttled THE SPIRIT AND THE FLESH COPYRIGHT, 1936, BY PEARL S BUCK ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, including the nght to reproduce tks lw J or portions thereof in any form. Wished by JOHN DAY in association with REYNAL HITCHCOCK PAINTED AND BOUND IN THE UNITED STATES 07 AMERICA BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, INC, CAMDEN, N J, ANGEL one of an order of spiritual beings, attendants and messengers o God, usually spoken of as employed by him m ordering the affairs of the universe, and particularly of mankind. They are commonly regarded as bodiless intelligences. Century Dictionary Who maketh his angels spirits And his ministers a flame of fire The Epistle to the Hebrews. YOU might have seen him walking along the street of any little Chinese village or market town, a tall, slender, slightly stooping American. At one time in his life he wore Chinese clothes. I have a picture of him thus, seated upon a stiff carved Chinese chair, his large American feet planted before him in huge Chinese shoes, those shoes which made the Chinese women laugh behind their hands when they cut the soles, and which made many a passerby stop and stare as he strode by in dust or upon cobblestones. He even smiled himself, a little painfully, when open jokes were shouted as he passed. But theChinese shoes, the long Chinese robe, the little round black Chinese hat with its red button none of these made him in the least Chinese. No one could possibly mistake him. The spare, big-boned frame, the big, thin delicate hands, the nobly shaped head with its large features, the big nose, the jutting lower jaw, the extraordinary, pellucid, child-blue eyes, the reddish fair skin and slightly curly dark hair these were purely and simply American. But he wandered about China for more than half a cen tury. He went there young, and there he died, an old man, his hair snow white, but his eyes still child-blue. In JO those days of his old age I said to him, I wish you would write down what your life has been for us to read. For he had traveled the country north and south, east and west, in city and country. He had had adventures enough to fill books and had been in danger of his life again and again. He had seen the Chinese people as few white men ever have in the most intimate moments of their own lives, in their homes, at marriage feasts, in sickness and in death. He had seen them as a nation in the cycle of their times he had seen the reign of emperors and the fall of empire, revolution and the rise of a republic and revolution again. So he wrote down the story of his life as it seemed to him when he was seventy years old. He spent his spare time throughout a whole summer writing it. I used to hear his old typewriter tapping uncertainly during hot afternoon hours when everybody else was sleeping, or in the early dawn, because, having had as a boy to rise early on a farm in West Virginia, he could never sleep late. It was more than a physical inability it was spir itjjaL Arise, my soul, for it is day The night comcth when no man can work. The night the night He re membered always the shortness of life. As for man, his days are as grass as a flower of the field, so he flourished. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone and the place thereof shall know it no more. But when it was finished the story of all his years made II only twenty-five pages. Into twenty-five pages he had put all that seemed important to him of his life. I read it through in an hour. It was the story of his soul, his un changing soul...

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.