6/2/2023 0 Comments The good earth 1931![]() ![]() “The small white clean Presbyterian American world of my parents and the big loving merry not-too-clean Chinese world. “I grew up in a double world,” Buck recalled in her 1954 memoir, My Several Worlds, in which she described her early years with affection. And it was in China that her adored mother, her father, two brothers, and two sisters lay buried. China had inspired her humanitarian work. China had provided much of the material for many of her 70-odd books, mostly novels but also plays, short fiction, children’s stories, biographies of her parents, essays, and poetry. ![]() Chinese was her first language, the one in which she mentally composed sentences before putting them to paper in English. ![]() It was the early 1970s, and Buck, the American author who had won the Nobel Prize for her books set in China, had not set foot there herself in nearly four decades, as the country was transformed by the Japanese invasion, civil war, and the triumph of communism.Īlthough she had been born in West Virginia in 1892 while her missionary parents were home on leave, China was the country where she had grown up, first married, and written her most famous novel, The Good Earth (1931). As Pearl Buck neared her 80th birthday, she became obsessed by the idea of returning to China. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |