How does a woman of this magnitude and range slip away from our national consciousness? She has not exactly disappeared. Rather, as one reader of an earlier draft of this book shrewdly put it, she has been 'hidden in plain sight,' obscured beneath a caricature that belies her complexity and her achievement. ... In the years after World War II, Buck's literary reputation shrunk to the vanishing point. She stood on the wrong side of virtually every line drawn by those who constructed the lists of required reading in the 1950s and 1960s.

Buck's efforts on behalf of equality included tireless support for women's rights. She promoted modern birth control and called her friend Margaret Sanger 'one…

She was a spokesman on all sorts of issues: freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the adoptability of disadvantaged children, the future of China, especia…

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come into contact with a new idea.

Mark how my fame rings out from zone to zone: A thousand critics shouting: 'He's unknown!'

Headmaster: Shyness had always been a disease with him, and it was shyness and a longing for anonymity that made him disguise himself. Clad in the magnificent …

Gildas's On the Ruin of Britain is not an attempt at a reasoned account of his times: it is...a brilliant vitriolic diatribe on the wickedness of all things Br…