Recomendation: “Pearl S Buck, A Cultural Biography” by Peter Conn

[mirgcire]

I just finished an informative and eye-opening biography of Pearl Buck. The book is “Pearl S Buck, A Cultural Biography” by Peter Conn. Before reading this book, I knew that Pearl Buck wrote a book called “The Good Earth”, but was unaware of the historical significance of the book, or for that matter of Pearl Buck herself. This book is a great read, not just for the chance to learn about the historical impact of an exceptional and under appreciated writer, but also for a better understanding for the cultural evolution of the US and China during the twentieth century. The following remarks were mostly quoted from the books preface.

“This was a woman who had written over seventy books, many of them best-sellers, including fifteen Book-of-the-Month Club selections. She had worked in virtually every genre of writing: novels, short stories, plays, biographies, autobiographies, translations (from the Chinese), children’s literature, essays, journalism, [and] poetry. She won the Nobel Prize in literature (with Toni Morrison, she is only one of 2 American women to do so), and a Pulitzer, and the Howells Medal, and election to the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a dozen honorary degrees from prestigious universities”. “Her novels continue to be read around the world, n English and in scores of translations.” “In a word, Perl Buck was one of the most popular novelists of the twentieth century.”

“Buck’s fiction broke new ground in subject matter, especially in her representations of Asia, and above all in her portraits of Asian women.” Toni Morrison wrote “she misled me … and made me feel that all writers wrote sympathetically, empathetically, honestly and forthrightly about other cultures” It is the passionate testimony of these and other American readers that demonstrate the profound impact that she had on American politics in the twentieth century.

“Amid pious invocations of multiculturalism, a shrinking world, and the imminent arrival of the Pacific Century, the peoples of Asia and the West continue to view each other through veils of cliché and misunderstanding. At such a moment in political and cultural history, Perl Buck’s stories should be a subject of increasing relevance and even urgency. Whatever the strengths and limits of her Asian images, she was a pioneer, introducing American readers to landscapes and people they had long ignored.”

“Pearl Buck grew up knowing China as her actual, day-to-day world, while America was [to her] a place of conjecture and simplified images. Furthermore, almost uniquely among white American writers, she spent the first half of her life as minority person, an e experience that had much to do with her lifelong passion for interracial understanding.”

“Throughout her American years, Pearl Buck was one of the leading figures in the effort to promote cross-cultural understanding between Asia and the United States. In 1941, for example, she and her second husband, Richard Walsh, founded the East and West Association as a vehicle of educational exchange. … In the early 1940s, Buck and Walsh led the national campaign to repeal the notorious Chinese exclusion laws. And throughout World War II Buck was one of the few prominent Americans who spoke out strongly against the US internment of Japanese Americans.”

“In 1949 She created the Welcome House Adoption Program. Her goal was to develop an agency that would find adoptive families for bi-racial children that were considered unadoptable because of the ethnic status. Now one of the oldest and most respected adoption programs in the world, Welcome House® has found loving families for more than 7,000 children.” – from Welcome House home page

“Along with her efforts in children’s welfare, Buck was also active throughout her adult life in the American civil rights movement. Walter White, a long time executive secretary of the NAACP, speaking at a 1942 Madison Square Garden rally said that only two white Americans understood the reality of black life: Eleanor Roosevelt and Perl Buck.”

“Pearl’s fiction gave voice to those who had not been heard, and succeeded in credibly dramatizing people and places that had been unknown and alien to most of her readers. She had, that is to say, a gift for making the strange seem familiar.”

Edited January 19, 2010 at 12:22 AM by mirgcire
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[Sean93]

If you liked that you'll probably like her autobiography called "My Several Worlds" or something like that.