Pearl S Buck, a novelist, is largely forgotten now, but her book, The Good Earth, about peasant life in rural China, was seismic when it was published in 1931. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and demythologized the Chinese in the United States and Britain, effectively changing the minds of millions about the so-called “heathens”, a word not allowed the her childhood home. Mrs Buck’s parents were Presbyterian missionaries, which she herself became as an adult. Her view of her father, Absalom Sydenstricker, was conflicted - he was the source of stability and steadfastness, but he was horrible to her mother. Of him, she wrote
© 2024 John Oliver
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