Hers was a fairy-tale childhood of the bleak and semi-tragic variety. The child of a Presbyterian missionary to China, she grew up amid bandits, beggars, lepers, typhoons, floods, rebellions, famine, sinister mobs, marauding soldiers, opium clouds. Pearl Buck later became the first American woman to win a Nobel for literature.īuck lived in interesting times, and in interesting places. Published in 1931, “The Good Earth” spent two years at the top of the best-seller list and won its author a Pulitzer Prize. (The 9-year-old she left in America had made a sport of flinging porridge and dirt at the keys.) She felt her story already formed, at the tips of her fingers, and so it must have been: Five months later, a completed manuscript sailed to America. While her younger daughter was at nursery school, she chained herself every morning - another madwoman in the attic - to a battered typewriter. The parting was excruciating she was, she recalled, “nearly destroyed by grief and fear.” The house felt empty on her return to Nanjing, but she knew precisely what to do: “This I decided was the time to begin really to write.” She did so with borrowed money, as she could not afford the fees. In 1929, an American woman traveled from her home in China to settle her severely impaired daughter in a New Jersey institution.
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