In this brilliantly conceived biography, Conn, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, sets out to reconstruct Buck's life, her extraordinary commitment to social justice and her literary achievement. To her many (primarily male) critics, Buck was an overrated storyteller whose best-selling portrayals of Chinese peasants struggling in a land on the brink of revolution in no way merited the Pulitzer or Nobel prizes. Time and the reading public seem to have agreed, as only The Good Earth survivesprincipally as a late-night movie classic. Born in West Virginia in 1892 to Protestant missionary parents, Pearl Sydenstricker spent almost all of her first 40 years in China. Although she was bilingual, she felt an outsider in both countries, and Conn speculates that her experiences in China's white minority led to a lifelong advocacy of interracial understanding. She went to college in the U.S., but returned to China, where she married her first husband, J. Lossing Buck, and gave birth to her only child, who suffered from phenylketonuria (PKU). Then, in 1934, faced with the Japanese invasion, civil tensions and escalating anti-foreigner sentiment, the Bucks returned to the U.S. As her literary works slipped into obscurity, Buck spent the decades until her death in 1973 devoting herself to issues of interracial conflict, immigration and the adoption of disadvantaged children, eventually establishing Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency. Perhaps Buck's fortunes have finally turned, for she has been singularly lucky in her biographer. Drawing on Buck's own words and actions, Conn steers a sympathetic yet intelligently balanced course, revealing in fascinating detail the gripping life story of a compelling woman. Photos. (Oct.)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Buck (1892-1973) knew the costs of cultural practices that oppress. A child of evangelical Protestant missionaries in China, she witnessed her father's accepted oppression of her mother via the Chinese caste system that trapped girls and women. Buck, who always considered herself an outsider, carried these thoughts with her when she left China to study in America. Later, her efforts on behalf of sexual and racial equality, religious diversity, world peace, birth control, interracial adoption, and humane treatment of handicapped people (her daughter Carol was retarded) fueled her personal autonomy and her prodigious output as a writer of fiction and nonfiction. The Good Earth (1931) brought her great popularity and the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1938 she won the Nobel. Aware that Buck's writing has fallen out of fashion, Conn (Literature in America, LJ 7/89) believes and proves that Buck helped enormously in forging an understanding of American and Chinese culture and deserves a place in American letters by virtue of her humanitarian work. His book is expertly written, not only as a biography but also as a political history. Highly recommended.Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.
"Conn examines almost every piece of work Buck ever wrote and explains why it's important today...[he] has gone far beyond merely touting Buck's literary merits to portray a consistent, believable and immensely fascinating woman. This is biography at its best: informative and entertaining....Conn has done an amazing amount of research...a compelling biography, a must-read for people interested in China, the publishing world, awe-inspiring women, the struggles of people of color, or the day-to-day drams of human life."
...an immensely interesting and detailed biography. -- Katha Pollitt, The New York Times Book Review
With The Good Earth author's visibility almost as low as when she was a missionary wife in China, Conn's biography tries to refocus on her role as an outspoken critic of imperialism, and as a supporter of feminism and racial equality.
Although Buck was a Nobel and Pulitzer prizewinning novelist—one who can claim credit for the first popular, realistic portrayals of China in America—her reputation suffered a swift decline after her death. An evaluative biography is overdue, but Conn's academic work seems an uncomfortable mix, part history primer, part summary survey of Buck's life. Its portrait of Buck is less detailed—and less engaging—than that to be found in her biographies of her evangelical missionary parents or in her own memoirs. Conn (English/Univ. of Pennsylvania) has gathered a great deal of information about China in the 19th and early 20th centuries, tracing its history from the Boxer Rebellion up to the Chinese civil war. He tries to place Buck's lonely childhood in China with her Calvinist father and homesick mother, her bicultural education, and her frustrated marriage to a hardworking but distant agricultural expert and missionary within the larger context of events in China—but he fails to integrate the two levels of narrative. When her second novel, The Good Earth, brought her sudden, skyrocketing fame, she settled in America, only to find her rosy expatriate patriotism at odds with native jingoism, racism, and sexism. For the rest of her career, while she continued to churn out novels, she also became an outspoken critic of American foreign policy and segregation, a supporter of women's rights, and a promoter of international/interracial adoption, facts just as dimmed now as her literary status.
Conn's fact-filled book goes some way to resuscitate Buck's career and strong opinions, but Buck herself remains a shadowy figure.
"Peter Conn's fine book, at once scholarly and readable, should do much to awaken awareness of her [Buck's] significant place in twentieth century American history....Drawing on his academic training in American Studies, he sets the events of her life against a rich background of Chinese and American political and social history. The impressive range of his research can be seen in the extensive notes, which fill almost seventy pages....His richly detailed and informative book should do much to encourage the reassessment of the life of this remarkable woman." Elizabeth Johnston Lipscomb, Magill's Literary Annual
