ABSTRACT
Pearl S. Buck was, as historian James Thomson noted, "the most influential Westerner to write about China since 13th-century Marco Polo". For two generations of Americans, Buck invented China. She worked in virtually every genre of writing, including novels, plays, biography, autobiography, translations, children's literature, essays, poetry. With her husband, Richard Walsh, she published the magazine Asia, which for a time had a substantial influence on American opinion about East Asia. Buck's stories of China were based on her own experiences and observations as a missionary daughter. In 1942 she published a collection of her articles and speeches on civil rights and international politics in a book titled American Unity and Asia. Along with several statements on the status of African-Americans and women, Buck rather bravely included a speech she had made condemning the internment of Japanese-Americans. With that speech, she joined a small handful of white Americans who opposed the most shameful domestic proceedings of World War II.
