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strain on Buck's other family connections. Eventually she moved out of Green Hills Farm and lived her last years, with Harris, in a small town in Vermont. She died there in 1973 at the age of eighty.

Pearl Buck's life was uncommonly eventful, the sort of story that might have been invented by her favorite novelist, Charles Dickens. She lived half her lifetime in Asia, half in the West. She began in poverty and ended her life as a millionaire, along the way winning the most coveted literary prize in the world. She took part in warfare and revolution, played a leading role in several twentieth-century struggles for human rights, and established herself as one of the most powerful women of the century.

In all of this, Pearl Buck left a legacy larger than her classic novel, The Good Earth, and her other writings. In their range and scale, her remarkable achievements echoed those of the mythic woman warriors she had first known in her own Chinese childhood.

Peter Conn

University of Pennsylvania