Hidden Flower (Portway Reprints) [Hardcover]

Pearl S. Buck (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 244 pages
• Publisher: C.Chivers (August 24, 1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0855945710
• ISBN-13: 978-0855945718
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

More About the Author

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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My own hidden flower, February 22, 2003

By 

Kristi A. Sakai (Oregon) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hidden Flower (Mass Market Paperback)

I first read this book when I contained my own "not so" hidden flower, I was a six months pregnant American woman married to a native Japanese. I was also young, in my early twenties. It touched me incredibly deeply. It is the story of young naive love, love that does not question if it chooses wisely. It is about passion without reason and the consequences of that love that cause great pain in the end. The young heroine chooses to love an American military man and marry him. He is enamoured with her, comletely taken and brings her home to be his bride only to discover that it is against the law to be married to a non-white. Indeed this law was changed only within my own lifetime. I can't imagine having to make the terrible choices the young woman was faced with once she found she was going to have a baby. The other interesting issue is the taste the American serviceman shows for the sexy exotic nature of his bride, but when it truly comes to the reality of life he easily discards her. ALthough he initially married her one can see the old saying emerge: "Asian girls are for fun, white girls are for marriage."

A touching and sad story, one that is hard for the younger generation to comprehend.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Profound insights from a not so tolerant era, September 4, 2002

By 

Andrew N. Weber - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hidden Flower (Mass Market Paperback)

This book is one of the most intelligent, moving and open-minded statements on interracial love and relationships that I have ever come across. Buck's story of a star-crossed pair of East-West lovers set in post-War Japan explores the racial pride and prejudices of both the East and West. She also manages to tell a deeply moving human story that transcends race. And remember, she was doing this in pre-MLK America, when non-mixing of the races was a cherished American value. Few if any authors have handled this subject with more insight and even-handedness than Buck. And none with more genuine compassion. Should be required reading in any multi-ethnic society.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Hidden Flower - Excellent Reading!, January 22, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Hidden Flower (Mass Market Paperback)

This is a captivating story of the unexpected love between an American soldier and an aristocratic Japanese student, set in WWII. They are together against the world - her parents in Kyoto-Japan, his parents in America, and the prejudices of the era against mixed marriages and the product of them, mixed children. 'The Hidden Flower' is one of Buck's masterpieces!