Pearl Buck was raised in China by her American parents, Presbyterian missionaries from Virginia. Blonde and blue-eyed she looked startlingly foreign, but felt as at home as her Chinese companions. She ran free on the grave-littered grasslands behind her house, often stumbling across the tiny bones of baby girls who had been suffocated at birth. Buck's father was a terrifying figure, with a maniacal zeal for religious conversion - a passion rarely shared by the local communities he targeted. He drained the family's budget for his Chinese translation of the New Testament, while his aggrieved, long-suffering wife did her utmost to create a homely environment for her children, several of whom died tragically young.
Pearl Buck would eventually rise to eminence in America as a bestselling author (her most renowned work, The Good Earth, re-entered the bestseller charts in 2004 when it was selected for Oprah's Book Club) but in this startlingly original biography, Spurling recounts with elegance and great insight her unspeakable upbringing in a China that was virtually unknown to the West.
- 352 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Information
Publisher
Profile BookseBook ISBN
9781847651938
Year
2011Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- MAP
- Foreword
- 1 Family of Ghosts
- 2 Mental Bifocals
- 3 The Spirit and the Flesh
- 4 Inside the Doll’s House
- 5 Thinking in Chinese
- 6 In the Mirror of Her Fiction
- 7 The Stink of Condescension
- Postscript: Paper People
- Sources and Acknowledgments
- Key to Sources
- Notes
- Note on Transliteration
- Pearl S. Buck International
- List of Illustrations
- Index