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)
Pearl S. Buck was one of the most renowned, interesting, and controversial figures ever to influence American and Chinese cultural and literary history--and yet she remains one of the least studied, honored, or remembered. In this richly illustrated and meticulously crafted narrative, Conn recounts Buck's life in absorbing detail, tracing the parallel course of American and Chinese history. This "cultural biography" thus offers a dual portrait: of Buck, a figure greater than history cares to remember, and of the era she helped to shape.
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