By the time Pearl S. Buck published "The Enemy" in 1942, the United States had officially been at war with Japan for nearly a year, she had won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth, and she had become the first (and, for more than a half a century, the only) American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Buck’s Nobel Prize was primarily the result of what the nominating committee deemed her “rich and genuine epic description of Chinese peasant life.” Indeed, Buck is so associated with novels about Chinese life that many are surprised to discover she was an American citizen born in West Virginia. While “The Enemy” is another solid addition to a body of work...
