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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 33607001013138 | Adult Nonfiction | 928 BUCK | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this brilliantly conceived biography, Conn, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, sets out to reconstruct Buck's life, her extraordinary commitment to social justice and her literary achievement. To her many (primarily male) critics, Buck was an overrated storyteller whose best-selling portrayals of Chinese peasants struggling in a land on the brink of revolution in no way merited the Pulitzer or Nobel prizes. Time and the reading public seem to have agreed, as only The Good Earth survivesprincipally as a late-night movie classic. Born in West Virginia in 1892 to Protestant missionary parents, Pearl Sydenstricker spent almost all of her first 40 years in China. Although she was bilingual, she felt an outsider in both countries, and Conn speculates that her experiences in China's white minority led to a lifelong advocacy of interracial understanding. She went to college in the U.S., but returned to China, where she married her first husband, J. Lossing Buck, and gave birth to her only child, who suffered from phenylketonuria (PKU). Then, in 1934, faced with the Japanese invasion, civil tensions and escalating anti-foreigner sentiment, the Bucks returned to the U.S. As her literary works slipped into obscurity, Buck spent the decades until her death in 1973 devoting herself to issues of interracial conflict, immigration and the adoption of disadvantaged children, eventually establishing Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency. Perhaps Buck's fortunes have finally turned, for she has been singularly lucky in her biographer. Drawing on Buck's own words and actions, Conn steers a sympathetic yet intelligently balanced course, revealing in fascinating detail the gripping life story of a compelling woman. Photos. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
Buck (1892-1973) knew the costs of cultural practices that oppress. A child of evangelical Protestant missionaries in China, she witnessed her father's accepted oppression of her mother via the Chinese caste system that trapped girls and women. Buck, who always considered herself an outsider, carried these thoughts with her when she left China to study in America. Later, her efforts on behalf of sexual and racial equality, religious diversity, world peace, birth control, interracial adoption, and humane treatment of handicapped people (her daughter Carol was retarded) fueled her personal autonomy and her prodigious output as a writer of fiction and nonfiction. The Good Earth (1931) brought her great popularity and the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1938 she won the Nobel. Aware that Buck's writing has fallen out of fashion, Conn (Literature in America, LJ 7/89) believes and proves that Buck helped enormously in forging an understanding of American and Chinese culture and deserves a place in American letters by virtue of her humanitarian work. His book is expertly written, not only as a biography but also as a political history. Highly recommended.Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface: RediscoveringPearl Buck |
| 1 Missionary childhood |
| 2 New worlds |
| 3 Winds of change |
| 4 The Good Earth |
| 5 An exile's return |
| 6 The prize |
| 7 Wartime |
| 8 Losing battles |
| 9 Pearl Sydenstricker |