With The Good Earth author's visibility almost as low as when she
was a missionary wife in China, Conn's biography tries to refocus
on her role as an outspoken critic of imperialism, and as a
supporter of feminism and racial equality. Although Buck was a
Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning novelist - one who can claim
credit for the first popular, realistic portrayals of China in
America - her reputation suffered a swift decline after her death.
An evaluative biography is overdue, but Conn's academic work seems
an uncomfortable mix, part history primer, part summary survey of
Buck's life. Its portrait of Buck is less detailed - and less
engaging - than that to be found in her biographies of her
evangelical missionary parents or in her own memoirs. Conn
(English/Univ. of Pennsylvania) has gathered a great deal of
information about China in the 19th and early 20th centuries,
tracing its history from the Boxer Rebellion up to the Chinese
civil war. He tries to place Buck's lonely childhood in China with
her Calvinist father and homesick mother, her bicultural education,
and her frustrated marriage to a hardworking but distant
agricultural expert and missionary within the larger context of
events in China - but he fails to integrate the two levels of
narrative. When her second novel, The Good Earth, brought her
sudden, skyrocketing fame, she settled in America, only to find her
rosy expatriate patriotism at odds with native jingoism, racism,
and sexism. For the rest of her career, while she continued to
churn out novels, she also became an outspoken critic of American
foreign policy and segregation, a supporter of women's rights, and
a promoter of international/interracial adoption, facts just as
dimmed now as her literary status. Conn's fact-filled book goes
some way to resuscitate Buck's career and strong opinions, but Buck
herself remains a shadowy figure. (Kirkus Reviews)
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.
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