The Lives of Pearl Buck (Masterplots II: Juvenile and Young Adult Biography Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Irvin Block
- First Published: 1973
- Time of Work: 1892–1973
- Setting: Tsiangkiangpu, Chinkiang, Nanhsuchow, Nanking, and Shanghai, China; West Virginia; Virginia; Ithaca, New York; Bucks County, Pennsylvania; New York City; and Danby, Vermont
- Principal Characters: Pearl S. Buck, Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker, Absalom Sydenstricker, John Lossing Buck, Carol Buck, Richard J. Walsh, Ernest Hocking
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: Family or family life, Authors or writers, Missions or missionaries, Abandoned children, Novelists, Nobel Prizes, Orphans or orphanages, China or Chinese people, Biography, Charities
- Locales: United States, China
Form and Content
Irvin Block’s The Lives of Pearl Buck: A Tale of China and America begins with the story of Buck’s birth in her maternal grandparents’ home in West Virginia while her parents were on leave from China. Block then narrates all the major events of Buck’s life, culminating in her fame at the age of forty following the publication of the novel The Good Earth (1931). The last third of the book describes, in much less detail, her remaining forty-one years, and the author provides short summaries of some of Buck’s most famous novels.
The...
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