One understands the importance and reasons for reading and knowing a bit about the biography of an author, particularly when the read novel is depicting historical, traditions, eras or chronological life or lives in its pages. For example, we read in the seventies a book from Pearl Buck East wind, West wind, a story that we wrongly remember as occurring in the eighteenth or nineteenth century hence not remembering the location in time of the book.
I checked on the web and on fast research the algorithm gave me an answer that the book was published in 1973. It was a republishing. After some more thorough research the answer on #Babelio which is by far the best critical literature website of Pearl Buck's book gave us back the insights of this beautiful and poetic work we scorched a bit further down.
The biography from #Wikipedia though, showed that Pearl Buck was born in 1892 and died in 1973, that she had won the literature Nobel prize in 1938, eight years after writing East wind, west wind, and was won for "her rich and epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces".
Astounding is the number of novels or books she has written in her lifetime and the quality of her writing and poetry.
She was also the first woman laureate of the American Pulitzer prize
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck has also created a foundation where she invested money, time and efforts in taking care of abandoned youngsters and their adoptions as well as being active in favour of women's rights and minorities.
Briefly and in two sentences which is an offence to the "oeuvre".
The story is happening in the early nineteen hundreds, the twentieth century in China where a promised and tortured banded-feet young woman had to be fashionable in order to marry a husband she didn't know, but the parents had decided before her birth. He was a Chinese man coming back from Occident around 1920 whose new approach to life shared between confrontations of east and west winds would reveal a cyclonic temper and twisted feelings.
The name of this young woman who suffered excruciating pains physically and morally amidst foot bandages rituals and traditions from her earliest age is Kwei Lan who had to marry as a teenager.