Her life was not all roses: In America in the 1950s, she was condemned by some as a communist in China, she was condemned by the communists.Īlmost until her death in her Vermont home in 1973, Buck was world-famous, lionized, listened to. Influenced by Chinese novels, she wrote The Good E arth in about two months when she was nearly 40 and living in a missionary community in Nanjing with her missionary husband and their adopted daughter. But Spurling shows how China and the Chinese shaped Buck as a person and as a writer.īilingual from infancy, Buck had the rarer ability to write in English the way Chinese people think, write and speak in their languages, which gave her tremendous narrative power as a novelist. He was so focused on his mission he neglected his children and his long-suffering wife, Carie, who was her daughter's touchstone. Born Pearl Sydenstricker in 1892 in West Virginia, she was raised in different parts of mostly western China, the daughter of Absalom Sydenstricker, a Southern Presbyterian whose antique name matched his antique ideas about evangelizing.
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