1970 1st Edition Novel, "Mandala: A Novel of India", by Pearl S. Buck

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Offered is a 1970 1st Edition hardcover copy of Pearl S. Buck's "Mandala: A Novel of India". The dust jacket … Read more Offered is a 1970 1st Edition hardcover copy of Pearl S. Buck's "Mandala: A Novel of India". The dust jacket refers to it as a Book Club Edition, there is no ISBN. While not one of her most known novels, this book covers the cultural and socio-political divisions of India in the 1960s through the lens of a brilliant novelist. From the publisher: "...tells the story of a modern Indian princely family grappling with the political changes of the New India, particularly after their son's death in a Sino-Indian border conflict. The novel explores themes of Eastern and Western cultural conflicts, various forms of love, and the intertwining of mysticism, history, and contemporary issues in India."
Measures: 5.75" wide, 8.5" tall, 1.375" deep
Format: 376 pages, Hardcover, Dust Jacket
Published: January 1, 1970 by The John Day Company
Bio:
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.
Buck was born in West Virginia, but in October 1892, her parents took their 4-month-old baby to China. As the daughter of missionaries and later as a missionary herself, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, with her parents, and in Nanjing, with her first husband. She and her parents spent their summers in a villa in Kuling, Mount Lu, Jiujiang, and it was during this annual pilgrimage that the young girl decided to become a writer. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, then returned to China. From 1914 to 1932, after marrying John Lossing Buck she served as a Presbyterian missionary, but she came to doubt the need for foreign missions. Her views became controversial during the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, leading to her resignation. After returning to the United States in 1935, she married the publisher Richard J. Walsh and continued writing prolifically. She became an activist and prominent advocate of the rights of women and racial equality, and wrote widely on Chinese and Asian cultures, becoming particularly well known for her efforts on behalf of Asian and mixed-race adoption. See less