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Despite myriad ways Pearl Buck's vision was shifted and forever changed by her youth in China, she felt it had also made her permanently uncomfortable with the English language and an expert in many things Americans didn't care to know. Shortly before the publication of A House Divided—the final book in the three-part Good Earth trilogy—Buck gave a lecture at Yale University titled "Advice for the Unborn Novelist." In it she suggested that writers were better off being born in their own country. She says, "Go out and be born among gypsies and thieves or among happy workaday people who live in the sun and do not think about their souls." (Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography by Peter Conn, p. 178)
Published 09/15/2004

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