Fighting Angel
Encyclopedia
Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul (1936) is a memoir, sometimes called a "creative non-fiction novel," written by Pearl S. Buck
about her father, Absalom Sydenstricker
(1852-1931) as a companion to her memoir of her mother, The Exile
(1936).
The book is conflicted portrait of her father written in 1936 to take advantage of the success of The Exile but also to tell a different part of her parents’ story. “Andrew,” the name she uses for her father in the book, had a “swordlike singleness of heart,” for the early missionaries, she wrote, were “born warriors and very great men” who were “proud and quarrelsome and brave and intolerant and passionate.” He dedicated himself to “the Work,” as he called it, but a lifetime of evangelizing produced few converts and at the cost of scarcely recognizing the existence of his wife or family and of failing to understand China. Though her father professed not to know what the word “imperialism” meant, Buck sees his mission as part of the “astounding imperialisms of the West.” Buck later remarked that reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick saved her soul, and perhaps she saw something of her father in Captain Ahab, a figure also bent on a mission.
Pearl S. Buck
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu , was an American writer who spent most of her time until 1934 in China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the U.S. in 1931 and 1932, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932...
about her father, Absalom Sydenstricker
Absalom Sydenstricker
Absalom Sydenstricker was an American Presbyterian missionary to China from 1880 to 1931. The Sydenstricker log house at the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace in Hillsboro, West Virginia was Absalom's early childhood home....
(1852-1931) as a companion to her memoir of her mother, The Exile
The Exile (1936)
The Exile is a memoir/ biography, or work of creative non-fiction, written by Pearl S. Buck about her mother, Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker , describing her life growing up in West Virginia and life in China as the wife of the Presbyterian missionary Absalom Sydenstricker...
(1936).
The book is conflicted portrait of her father written in 1936 to take advantage of the success of The Exile but also to tell a different part of her parents’ story. “Andrew,” the name she uses for her father in the book, had a “swordlike singleness of heart,” for the early missionaries, she wrote, were “born warriors and very great men” who were “proud and quarrelsome and brave and intolerant and passionate.” He dedicated himself to “the Work,” as he called it, but a lifetime of evangelizing produced few converts and at the cost of scarcely recognizing the existence of his wife or family and of failing to understand China. Though her father professed not to know what the word “imperialism” meant, Buck sees his mission as part of the “astounding imperialisms of the West.” Buck later remarked that reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick saved her soul, and perhaps she saw something of her father in Captain Ahab, a figure also bent on a mission.
Reading
- Pearl S. Buck with an Introduction by Charles W. Hayford, Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul (Norwalk, CT: EastBridge, 2009).