Daily Archives for: January 20th, 2015

A 1940 Interview with Pearl S. Buck on Writing and Observation

By | On January 20, 2015 | Updated March 14, 2023 | Comments (4)

The following 1940 interview with Pearl S. Buck is excerpted from Writers and Writing by Robert van Gelder, 1946: Pearl Buck says that in American life she has found a limitless reservoir of material for writing.

She never “became Chinese,” she always knew that she was American, yet her discovery of this country has had a certain Columbian freshness. (Photo at right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The Good Earth was, in a way, “a pot-boiler,” written on “borrowed money and it had to be written at the time it was because I needed oh, a lot of money. Not just needed it. Had to have it.” Read More→

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Katherine Anne Porter At Work

By | On January 20, 2015 | Updated September 16, 2022 | Comments (0)

Excerpted from Writers and Writing by Robert van Gelder, 1946, an interview conducted with Porter in 1940: Katherine Anne Porter stated with evident surprise that her papers are now in order and in her own house.

Formerly she traveled a great deal with a suitcase for personal effects and a steamer trunk filled with manuscripts and notes. “Always I was up to my chin in paper.”

Now she has burned numerous short stories and four novels that she decided not to publish. But the material that she kept to work over is enough to occupy her well into her eighties. There are notes for novels, for a biography of Cotton Mather, and for some forty short stories.

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