Pearl Buck Wanted Her Books To Be Affordable

A couple of days ago in a box of books that sat curbside on Amsterdam Avenue near 101st Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side, I found a paperback copy of Pearl S. Buck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Good Earth, set in China. (The book was published in 1931.)

I've seen the 1937 movie on TV many years ago but I've never had the chance to read the book on which it was based until now.

Turning to the page following the title page is a brief comment by Buck (1892-1973) about her novel being issued in paperback. (The edition I have was published in September 2004, so her comments were made sometime in the 1950s when paperbacks first appeared.)

Said she, "I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within the reach of everybody."

I've never seen another writer make that statement. It would be wonderful if from time to time authors included such a statement of concern about the affordability of their books. They will no doubt make less money, something their publishers won't like, but it might help attract new readers to their work.

Stay Curious!

"People ask me, 'Why are you interested in physics?' But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity."--Cormac McCarthy, American novelist (1933-2023), quoted in his New York Times obituary (June 14, 2023), from an interview that was published in Rolling Stone magazine in 2007.

Ralph Ellison And The Yiddish Language

Sometimes the New York Times Book Review's "By the Book" Q & A feature will ask interviewees to name "the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently."

For me, it was learning that the African-American author Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man) spoke fluent Yiddish. That was a total surprise!

In Arnold Rampersad's 2007 Ellison biography, Harriet Davidson, an Ellison friend, related to Rampersad that Ellison told her "he had picked up a lot of it when he was young, in Oklahoma City and," she continued, "his mother had worked for Jews." During visits "he and my husband would sit on the porch and converse very easily in Yiddish. Ralph had no trouble speaking or understanding it. It brought him even closer to us."