The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Maxine Hong Kingston

Knopf, 1976 - Biography & Autobiography - 209 pages

Throughout this collection of memoirs, the author blends autobiography with old Chinese folktales. What results is a complex portrayal of the 20th century experiences of Chinese Americans living in the United States in the shadow of the Chinese revolution.

About the author

Born in California to immigrant Chinese parents, Kingston was educated at the University of California at Berkeley. Kingston soared to literary celebrity upon the publication of her autobiographica The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976). The Woman Warrior is dominated by Kingston's mother; her next work, China Men (1980), although not autobiographical in the manner of her previous book, is focused on her father and on the other men in her family, giving fictionalized, poetic versions of their histories. The combination of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and myth in both books create a form of balanced opposites that one critic has likened to yin and yang. Her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, was published in 1989.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts; A Borzoi book
• Author: Maxine Hong Kingston
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Knopf, 1976
• Original from: the University of Virginia
• Digitized: May 5, 2008
• ISBN: 0394400674, 9780394400679
• Length: 209 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / General; Biography & Autobiography / Women