Buck, Pearl S. "The Exile"

Buck, Pearl S. "The Exile" - 1936

Pearl S. Buck grew up mostly in China, the daughter of American missionaries. In her many novels she describes the life of Chinese people past and present.

This book, however, is a biography about her mother, Carie Stulting Sydenstricker, a missionary and the wife of a missionary, who led most of her adult life in a foreign place, who went through hard times both politically as well as personally. She lived through several invasions, the Japanese, the Russians, through illnesses and death of her children. She lives in two worlds and cannot claim either of them as her real home in the end.

Same as her novels, I really loved this biography of the author's mother. She shows how much love can change life of the people around you and sometimes of a lot more.

From the back cover:

"The biography of the mother of Pearl S. Buck, a portrait of an American woman in China."

Find other books by Pearl S. Book that I read here.

Pearl S. Buck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938 "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces".

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.