MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — West Virginia University and the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation, Inc. are co-sponsoring a Pearl Buck Day on Wed., Oct. 25 at the University’s Mountainlair Student Center. For WVU, this day of festivities helps to not only honor the 125th anniversary of the great author’s birth in Hillsboro (Pocahontas County), but also ideally augments Mountainer Week, a gala time of multiple academic festivities on campus and in Morgantown.
Miss Buck (1892-1973) was the first woman to win both the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes for Literature. Her Pulitzer in 1932 singled out her novel “The Good Earth” as an epic of humankind’s life experiences and was later made into a movie classic by Hollywood.
“The Pearl Buck Day came from the idea that WVU and the state of West Virginia are one, and celebrating Miss Buck’s 125thanniversary of her birth fit right into the Mountainer Week’s varied themes,” states Dr. Melanie Page, Assoc. V-P for Creative and Scholarly Activities at WVU. Page and Dr. Jay Cole, the Sr. Advisor to President E. Gordon Gee, among others, worked together to develop this new and lively option for the week. Continuing, Page asserts, “We should be proud of her literary, humanitarian and women rights accomplishments, which were way ahead of her time, so we, at WVU, are adopting the Pearl Buck Day into our future Mountainer Week schedules. This will be a fun day, combined with an Asian cooking lesson.”
Much is planned for this Pearl Buck Day celebration:
1) From 11 a.m.-to-4 p.m., her autographed novels will be sold on the Mountainlair’s 1st floor to benefit the preservation of her birthplace and its historical farm complex ;
2) At 11 a.m., a Birthday Cake Cutting will take place, as all other events are on the 1st floor;
3) At 12 p.m., Chef Melanie Campbell will demonstrate “Asian Cookbook” recipe cooking; and, finally,
4) At 2 p.m., the documentary film, “East Wind, West Wind: Pearl S. Buck, the Woman Who Embraced the World” will be shown in the Mountainlair’s Gluck Theater.
This special day’s celebration is spearheaded by the WVU Mountaineer Week Committee in cooperation with the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation, West Virginia Wesleyan College Library, the WVU Libraries State & Regional History Center and its related WVU-Pearl S. Buck-Manuscripts Advisory Committee.
For further information, log on : mountaineerweek.wvu.edu.
