The story of Tzu Hsi is the story of the last empress in China. In the novel, Nobel Prize Winner, Pearl S. Buck recreates the life of one of the most interesting rulers during a time of intense turbulence.
Pearl S. Buck's knowledge of and fascination with the Empresses' life are contagious. She reveals the essence of this self-involved and infamous last empress, at the same time she takes the reader through China's struggle for freedom and democracy.
Pearl S. Buck was born in West Virginia and taken to China as an infant before the turn of the century. Buck grew up speaking Chinese as well as English. She is the most widely translated American author to this day. She has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. She died in 1973.
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Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Her parents were Southern Presbyterian missionaries, most often stationed in China, and from childhood, Pearl spoke both English and Chinese. She returned to China shortly after graduation from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1914, and the following year, she met a young agricultural economist named John Lossing Buck. They married in 1917, and immediately moved to Nanhsuchou in rural Anhwei province. In this impoverished community, Pearl Buck gathered the material that she would later use in The Good Earth and other stories of China. Pearl began to publish stories and essays in the 1920s, in magazines such as The Nation, The Chinese Recorder, Asia, and The Atlantic Monthly. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published by the John Day Company in 1930. John Day's publisher, Richard Walsh, would eventually become Pearl's second husband, in 1935, after both received divorces.
In 1931, John Day published Pearl's second novel, The Good Earth. This became the bestselling book of both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal in 1935, and would be adapted as a major MGM film in 1937. Other novels and books of nonfiction quickly followed. In 1938, less than a decade after her first book had appeared, Pearl won the Nobel Prize in literature, the first American woman to do so. By the time of her death in 1973, Pearl had published more than seventy books: novels, collections of stories, biography and autobiography, poetry, drama, children's literature, and translations from the Chinese. She is buried at Green Hills Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
I thought I would never read a novel as outstanding as The Good Earth. And then I read Dragon Seed! Thus far, this is the greatest book I have ever read! There are truly no adjectives to satisfactorily describe the depth and poignancy of this novel. My heart filled with sorrow as I turned the pages of this mesmerizing story of the Chinese peasants' condition during World II. I would go back to re-read a paragraph every now and then in order to let the words seep into my very soul. I could not comprehend this unspeakable man's inhumanity to man, but there it was, as only Pearl Buck could write about it. Not to read this book at least once is not to have lived. I will carry the drama and heartbreak of Dragon Seed with me for the rest of my life. Dragon Seed is not just a novel; it is an experience of the heart and soul! It should be a must for everyone who truly loves great literature, and it should be required reading for every public high school student in this country.
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Pearl Buck describes the simple life of a village family in China before and during World War II. She follows the lives of each family member, the daughter & her husband who cooperate with the Japanese, the sons who escape to the hills & join the Chinese resistance, the youngest teenage daughter who is sent away to avoid rape, the simple aging farmer & his wife who stay with their land at all costs. While the village & nearby city are never named, it is evocative in some respects of the new book, "The Rape of Nanking." I've read this book twice.
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48 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 starsThe Greatest Book I Have EVER Read!, June 8, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Dragon Seed (Hardcover)
I read this book because I love Pearl S. Buck books! Of all her books this is the best! And even of all other books, this is my favorite! There is just so much to this book that no movie or review such as I am giving could properly give justice to it. The sequel to it, The Promise, is a must-read only because the end of Dragon Seed will not be enough for anyone. I would describe this book as historical fiction. The events are real, the place is real (which we find out in The Promise, is a hamlet outside of Nanking/Nanjing-Pinyin), and the cultural Chinese family as presented is real. Everything else is just magical fiction! The book is humorous in places and serious in others. This is the ONLY book i have ever read twice, and i could read it for a third time! I can tell anyone in the film industry that this book can be made into the next great movie success story! This is the best review i can give for the greatest book ever written. Now the best I can do is wait to see if my review can encourage the entire world to at least give this wonderful book the chance it deserves!
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