career, which she found incompatible with the role of wife and mother. When she discovered she was pregnant, she had an abortion and obtained a divorce, hoping for the independence she believed would foster her writing. This unfortunate series of events sent her into a depression and failing health. From that point on, she lived the secluded life of a semi-invalid.
Teasdale’s beautiful poetry, bespeaking the secrets of the human heart, created an international reputation, beginning with her early Love Songs. Subsequently, she channeled her painful struggles for freedom from oppressive Victorian mores in Flame and Shadow. She won the highly regarded Columbia University Poetry Society prize, and in 1917 won the Pulitzer Prize for Love Songs, earning her place in history as the first poet to receive this prestigious award. Ultimately, the delicate despair described in her poems won out, and Sara Teasdale committed suicide in 1933.
O, beauty, are you not enough? Why am I crying after love?
Sara Teasdale, “Spring Night”
PEARL BUCK pearl of great price
Pearl Buck was born in West Virginia in 1892 to the Sydenstricker family, deeply religious people who dedicated their lives to missionary work. They chose to spread the word of Christianity in China, and Pearl spent a good portion of her girlhood there. She attended Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia, but after she graduated hurried back to Asia with her teaching certificate.
She made her living as a teacher until she married John Buck, a fellow American and an agriculturist. They married in 1917 and lived in northern China among the peasants. The Bucks had one child, born mentally handicapped, and adopted another child during Pearl’s tenure at the University of Nanking. In 1922, she started writing during the long hours she spent caring for her ailing mother. Her very first story was published in Asia magazine three years later. Pearl Buck returned to the United States to seek proper care for her daughter and studied for her master’s degree at Cornell. Later, she taught at three different universities in China until anti-foreigner sentiments became unavoidable. While fleeing violence in 1927, Pearl lost the manuscript for her first novel. Still, she continued, publishing East Wind: West Wind in 1930, followed the next year by The Good Earth.
The Good Earth was a global phenomenon from the beginning; in 1932, it won the Pulitzer Prize. A stage play was also written, as well as a script for the Academy Award-winning film. Pearl Buck was a huge success and saw her book translated into dozens of languages and selling millions of copies. In 1935, she left her adopted country, divorced her husband, and returned to the United States. Soon after, she married her publisher, Richard J. Walsh, but that didn’t stop her writing. While her success was generally more popular than critical, that all changed in 1938 when she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize. Buck was an amazingly prolific writer who once wrote five books in one year, penning more than eighty-five books in all. Her work includes plays, biographies, books for children, translations, and an autobiography as well as novels. She continued to write novels and articles through her entire life.
During the McCarthy years, she came under suspicion and was forced to write under the pseudonym John Sedges, but she never wavered in her essential beliefs of tolerance and understanding. She founded the East and West Association and was the president of the Author’s Guild, a free speech organization founded in the 1950s. She also created an organization to care for orphaned children of Asian mothers and American fathers and adopted six such orphans herself. A champion of women’s rights and rights for the mentally handicapped, she died of lung cancer in 1973 in her home of Danby, Vermont. She was a fierce crusader for greater mutual understanding for the people of the world, and with her Nobel Prize in Literature, she opened a new chapter for women in literature.
(I want to) write for the people…
Pearl S. Buck, regarding her great novel The Good Earth
GWENDOLYN BROOKS poet of the Beat
Gwendolyn Brooks has the distinction of being the first Black person to receive the Pulitzer Prize (for Annie Allen in 1950). One of the most innovative poets in the literary landscape of America, she was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas. Her family moved when she was young to the more urban city of Chicago, which imparted a street-smart influence that still informs her work. Brooks wanted to bring poetry to the poor Black kids of the inner city, and she attracted them with rapid-fire, tightly wound iambic pentameter that predated rap. In later life, she took a more radical bent, hooking up with the revolutionary Black Beat writer LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) and with Don L. Lee, and jumped into the causes of African Americans with both feet. She became a tough and angry Black Power poet, penning verses grounded in classical style deconstructed through the lens of her newfound racial awareness and commitment to cause. Forty years after her prizewinning feat, her poetry is still raw, fresh, and commanding.
I want to clarify my language. I want these poems to be free. I want them to be direct without sacrificing the kind of music, the picture-making I’ve always been interested in.
Gwendolyn Brooks
GRAZIA DELEDDA songs of Sardinia
While Pearl Buck and The Good Earth are household names, the Italian novelist Grazia Deledda is much less familiar. But she received the Nobel Prize for Literature twelve years before Buck and was a powerful voice among her people.
Born in 1871 in Sardinia, Deledda was a country girl who had little exposure to formal education. She did have access to books, however, and read avidly. She came from a troubled clan and was seemingly the only family member to escape illness or criminality; thus she ended up bearing the brunt of household chores and responsibility. Still, she managed to write in her precious spare time.
She married in 1900, and with her new husband moved to Rome, where she sought a broader readership for her work. She soon received approval from the critics and began writing intently, striving for excellence, writing what she knew best—stories of the life and passions of the peasants of Sardinia: in her words, a place of “myths and legends.” Deledda was dedicated to her craft and produced a considerable body of work, including her favorite novel, Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind), the story of a dissolute family centered around the guilt of a servant, and La Madre (The Mother), about the turbulent relationship between a mother and her son. In addition to her novels and short stories, she produced one volume of poetry, Paesaggi sardi (Sardinian Landscapes), as well as a translation of Balzac and a nonfiction analysis of the customs of her native island.
She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1926, the first Italian woman to be so honored. She died ten years later of breast cancer, but not before the publication that year of La chiesa della solitudine (The Church of Solitude), a semiautobiographical novel about a woman who deals with her breast cancer diagnosis at the cusp of the twentieth century by keeping it a secret, with predictable human fallout; it was published in an English translation by E. Ann Matter in 2002. Her autobiography, Cosima, was published posthumously the next year.
LUTIE EUGENIA STERNS librarian extraordinary
In 1887, Lutie Sterns began teaching in the Milwaukee school system. She quickly became appalled at the paucity of books for her students and made such use of the public library for her kids that library officials offered her the job of superintendent of the circulation department. Lutie’s passion for the public library system would lead her to travel the state indefatigably by train, boat, buggy, and sleigh, preaching the importance of public libraries, and according to legend, wearing out five fur coats in the process. This was no easy
