A Pearl Buck Reader

by Pearl S. Buck

Two Reader's Digest books with Pearl Buck's books - First book contains "The Good Earth", "Imperial Woman", and "The China I Knew". Second book contains "The Promise", "Pavilion of Women", "A Bridge For Passing", and "The Three Daughters of Madame Liang". Books are in the original Reader's Digest box.

Genres: Fiction

500 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.
Buck was born in West Virginia, but in October 1892, her parents took their 4-month-old baby to China. As the daughter of missionaries and later as a missionary herself, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, with her parents, and in Nanjing, with her first husband. She and her parents spent their summers in a villa in Kuling, Mount Lu, Jiujiang, and it was during this annual pilgrimage that the young girl decided to become a writer. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, then returned to China. From 1914 to 1932, after marrying John Lossing Buck she served as a Presbyterian missionary, but she came to doubt the need for foreign missions. Her views became controversial during the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, leading to her resignation. After returning to the United States in 1935, she married the publisher Richard J. Walsh and continued writing prolifically. She became an activist and prominent advocate of the rights of women and racial equality, and wrote widely on Chinese and Asian cultures, becoming particularly well known for her efforts on behalf of Asian and mixed-race adoption.

Reviews

[Planetofthehats · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book on my library shelf as a high school student in the early 2000s and I am so lucky it found its way there. I devoured it. In a time before I had freely accessible internet it was a portal to another world, another time, another place. The heartaches of the characters I still hurt from now, more than twenty years later. As a city girl it made me think about where food came from, about the desperate and devastating crisis that one bad season can bring to the life of a subsistence farmer. It made me curious about world history when I had never cared to think of it before, and made me look beyond the borders of my home country.

I think of this book often and was so pleased to find this exact edition in a used bookstore by chance recently. I have begun collecting her work now and reading it more broadly. In the light of our modern eyes Buck may not be a wholly 'un-problematic' figure, but she is a beautiful creative with a lovely way of crafting a story. She was of her time and place and produced beautiful literature. I highly recommend seeing if she transports you as she did me. If she did there is a wealth of work to explore.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, but would have preferred to just read each story separately instead of the 3 condensed versions.