These Books are Pearl's Trivia Quiz

Answer:

Comfort Pearl Sydenstricker, best known as Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) was born in the United States and grew up in Zhenjiang in China where her parents worked as Presbyterian missionaries. She was raised bilingual, and was tutored by her mother and by a Chinese tutor. She spent three years in the United States to study at college and returned to China as a missionary. She married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural economist missionary, and she became a professor of English literature in Chinese universities.

Although Pearl Buck had been writing articles for American magazines since the early 1920s, her career as a writer began in 1930 with the publication of the novel "East Wind: West Wind". This work was followed by the trilogy of "The Good Earth" (1931), "Sons" (1932), and "A House Divided" (1935), which is a saga about the Wang family. These books made her famous and "The Good Earth" won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932.

In 1934, Pearl S. Buck left China due to political tensions. In 1935, she divorced from Lossing Buck and married her publisher, Richard J. Walsh. Throughout her life she published over 100 literature works, most of them set in China. Her work includes novels, short stories, fiction, and children's books, which addressed themes unusual for her time such as women's rights, problems with immigration and adoption, the clash between East and West, and between modernity and tradition.

The biographies of her mother and father entitled "The Exile" and "Fighting Angel" published in 1936 were cited and commented on by the Nobel Prize Committee. Several of the author's books have been made into films including "Dragon Seed" (1944) and more recently, "Pavilion of Women" (2001).

The "Dragon Seed" (1944) movie, starring Katharine Hepburn and Walter Huston, tells the story of the residents of a small village in China invaded by the Japanese army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. "Pavilion of Women" (1946) book serves as the basis for the film of the same name released in 2001. The starting point is the decision of Madame Wu, a member of one of the most traditional houses in China, to find a second wife for her husband and live with more freedom.

Pearl S. Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938 "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for biographical masterpieces". She was the first American writer to receive the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes.

The other books mentioned are: "Reeds in the Wind" (Grazia Deledda), "Runaway" (Alice Munro), "Beloved" (Toni Morison), "My Son's Story" (Nadine Gordimer), "The Grass is Singing" (Doris Lessing), "The Book of Jacob" (Olga Tokarczuk), "Jerusalem" (Selma Lagerlöf) and "Lay Down Your Arms" (Bertha von Suttner). The first seven authors mentioned received the Nobel Prize for Literature and Bertha von Suttner the Nobel Peace Prize.