PSB
, first US woman to win the Nobel prize in literature, was raised in a missionary family on illicit reading of novels from Victorian England and from a Chinese tradition of melodramatic, popular tales that were scorned by the literati. She began by writing stories and articles about China for American magazines. Her first book-length text (consigned not to publication but to a forgotten drawer) was a life of her recently-dead mother which simmers with rage at the forces which had shaped and warped her mother's life. Her first completed novel was destroyed in one of China's many local outbreaks of political violence. Her second published novel, The Good Earth, 1932, brought her unexpected international fame. After that she wrote for money and for good causes, reworking the rich material of her own experience in fiction and non-fiction (including memoir) which combats misogyny, xenophobia, racial and gender prejudice, and war.
