Books with author Pearl Buck

Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul is Pearl S. Buck’s profoundly touching memoir of her zealous Southern Presbyterian missionary father, Absalom Sydenstricker. Andrew (as he is called in the book) set off for China in 1880 and spent most of the next half century there until his death in 1931. From isolated settlements in the poor, hostile interior, he made long preaching trips through lands convulsed by famine, banditry, and revolution. Sydenstricker was a tragic Captain Ahab figure whose life’s work brought only a trickle of converts. His battles against church authorities – he was ahead of his time in wanting local Christians to be given greater power and in pushing for vernacular Chinese texts – meant ostracism by his colleagues and superiors. Above all, his fanatical devotion brought death and suffering to his family.Fighting Angel, which was published in late 1936, is a companion biography to Buck’s loving portrait of her mother, The Exile: Portrait of an American Mother, published earlier that year. Both books won great popular and critical success. When, in 1938, Pearl S. Buck became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was not only “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China” but also “for her biographical masterpieces.” Fighting Angel is a more balanced biography and the superior of the pair. In fact, in her acclaimed Burying the Bones, Pearl biographer Hilary Spurling ranks Fighting Angel after The Good Earth as “probably the best book Pearl ever wrote,” praising the memoir for its “combination of cool, sharp, scrutinizing intelligence and passionate emotion.”

When Pearl S. Buck finished writing her autobiographical work, My Several Worlds, she found that the most vivid character memory of her childhood life was Tzu Hsi, the last Empress of China. This is the woman usually known to Westerners as the Empress Dowager, or "Old Buddha." But how little the West really knows of her! She has figured in an occasional book, but never before in English, nor indeed in any language so far as we know, has the whole story of this fabulous woman been told. She ranks in history with Victoria of England and Catherine of Russia. Indeed, Tzu Hsi liked to think of Victoria as her sister-ruler and often remarked that thy divided the world between them, Victoria the Empress of the West and she the Empress of the East. Of the two, however, Tzu Hsi had the more romantic and extraordinary reign. She was born into violent and troubled times, in the last century of China's empire. Already the West was compelling that ancient and impregnable country to face the modern age. Slow to change, entrenched in pride and tradition, the ruling dynasty of the Manchus was reluctant to realize the portent of the times. It Tzu Hsi, this powerful and beautiful woman, who held the empire and the dynasty from the 1860's until her death in 1908 at the age of 74.