Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck's epic Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a China that was -- now in a Contemporary Classics edition. Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there," wrote Pearl Buck. In The Good Earth she presents a graphic view of a China when...

The conclusion to Buck's celebrated Good Earth trilogy: the story of a man's return to a homeland embroiled in revolution. On the eve of a popular rebellion, the Chinese government starts to crack down in cities across the country. Fleeing the turmoil, Wang Yuan, the son of a famous general and grandson of the patriarch of The Good Earth, leaves for America to study agriculture. When he returns to China six years later, he encounters a nation still...

The Nobel Prize-winning author's perceptive fable of cross-cultural passions in nineteenth-century China. In 1850s China, a young girl, Peony, is sold to work as a bondmaid for a rich Jewish family in Kaifeng. Jews have lived for centuries in this region of the country, but by the mid-nineteenth century, assimilation has begun taking its toll on their small enclave. When Peony and the family's son, David, grow up and fall in love with one another,...

A provocative and fascinating exploration of male–female relationships by the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Good Earth. Pearl S. Buck grew up in China, accustomed to its traditions, but when she moved to the United States as an adult in the 1930s, she was struck by the cultural differences in gender roles and expectations. In nine short chapters, she applies this personal experience to an exploration of the power dynamics of the American household,...

At the outbreak of war, a half-Chinese man sends his family back to America, beginning an absence punctuated only by his letters, and a son who must make sense of his mixed-race ancestry alone Elizabeth and Gerald MacLeod are happily married in China, bringing up their young son, Rennie. But when war breaks out with Japan, Gerald, who is half-Chinese, decides to send his wife and son back to America while he stays behind. In Vermont, Elizabeth longingly...

Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul is Pearl S. Buck's profoundly touching memoir of her zealous Southern Presbyterian missionary father, Absalom Sydenstricker. Andrew (as he is, called in the book) set off for China in 1880 and spent most of the next half century there until his death in 1931. From isolated settlements in the poor, hostile interior, he made long preaching trips through lands convulsed by famine, banditry, and revolution. Sydenstricker...

A widow's New England peace is interrupted by her feelings for two brilliant men, one much younger and the other quite older-and the dilemma of choosing between them At forty-three, Edith has lost a husband, and has children who have children of their own. Living in a large Vermont house, her days are spent idly reading and playing music. But all of this is to change when two candidates for her affection arrive on the scene. The first is thirty years...

A tale of four Chinese-American siblings in New York, and their bewildering return to their roots. In Kinfolk, a sharp dissection of the expatriate experience, Pearl S. Buck unfurls the story of a Chinese family living in New York. Dr. Liang is a comfortably well-off professor of Confucian philosophy, who spreads the notion of a pure and unchanging homeland. Under his influence, his four grown children decide to move to China, despite having spent...

The story of a dramatic period in the life of a nation, told through the experiences of one unforgettable family. 'The year was 4214 after Tangun of Korea, and 1881 after Jesus of Judea.' So begins The Living Reed, Pearl S. Buck's epic historical novel about four generations of one aristocratic family in Korea. Through the story of the Kims, Buck traces the country's journey from the late nineteenth century through the end of the Second World War....

The extraordinary and eventful personal account of the life of Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature Often regarded as one of Pearl S. Buck's most significant works, My Several Worlds is the memoir of a major novelist and one of the key American chroniclers of China. Buck, who was born to missionary parents in 1892, spent much of the first portion of her life in China, experiencing the Boxer Rebellion first...