Happy Birthday, Maxine Hong Kingston

Born October 27, 1940, Stockton, CA

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates the memoirist, peace activist, and novelist Maxine Hong Kingston on her eighty-fourth birthday. She is often credited with writing the first commercially successful literary work by an Asian American woman, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.

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Maxine Hong Kingston, ca. 1976, photo by Floyd K. Takeuchi.

“This is the most important thing about me—I’m a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I’m a trained reader.”

Maxine Hong Kingston, 2006, David Shankbone.

“I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.”

The Woman Warrior": Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), Kingston’s first book, blends traditional Chinese folktale and memoir to depict the narrator’s experience as a first-generation Chinese-American woman. China Men (1980), is the sequel to The Woman Warrior, featuring stories about the men in Kingston’s life during her upbringing. Hawai’i One Summer (1998) comprises eleven essays in which Kingston describes her experiences over the course of one summer in Hawai’i.

First published essay:

“No Name Woman,” VIVA, 1975, reprinted in The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Robert Atwan and Joyce Carol Oates (Mariner Books, 2001).

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, Hawai‘i One Summer, Other Writings, edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Library of America, 2022).

See also:

Ruth La Ferla, “For Maxine Hong Kingston, Age is Just Time Going By,” The New York Times, 2024.

Hua Hsu, “Maxine Hong Kingston’s Genre-Defying Life and Work,” The New Yorker, 2020.

E.D. Huntley, “Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2001).

Watch: “An Evening with Maxine Hong Kingston,” USC Visions and Voices, 2023.

Watch: “Maxine Hong Kingston,” in conversation with Andy Kahan and Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2022.

Listen to: “Maxine Hong Kingston: Talking Story,” American Archive of Public Broadcasting, 1990.

Listen to: “A Broad Margin to My Life: Maxine Hong Kingston,” Poets House, 2015.