The Child Who Never Grew

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FOR SOME YEARS AT the close of World War II, three people who took writing seriously chanced to live near one another in an attractive corner of eastern Pennsylvania. Centering on the handsome rural town of Doylestown and not far from the artists’ colony at New Hope, their homes formed an isosceles triangle. At the southwest corner lived Oscar Hammerstein, gifted lyricist of many New York musical shows, and Pulitzer Prize winner in 1949 for the hugely successful South Pacific. Due north of him, eleven miles distant, I lived with my own prize in 1948 for having written the book on which the play was based. And eight miles to the west of each of us stood the stately but not ostentatious home of the famous Pearl Buck, winner of the Pulitzer in 1932 and the Nobel in 1938, both for her tremendously appealing novel The Good Earth.

We knew one another favorably, and by coincidence each of us had a strong connection with Asia. Pearl Buck’s prizewinning novel dealt with the agrarian peasants of China. Oscar Hammerstein’s Australian wife had a sister married to a Japanese, and I would soon have a Japanese wife, but she was born in Colorado and so had always had American citizenship, a fact which did not keep her from being interned in a camp during the war against Japan.

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