author
Nora Waln
1895–1964
A bestselling American writer and journalist, she brought readers close to everyday life in China and to the gathering menace of Nazi Germany. Her work was shaped by years of travel, sharp firsthand reporting, and a deeply felt Quaker outlook.
1 Audiobook
The Street of Precious Pearls
by Nora Waln
About the author
Born in Pennsylvania in 1895, Nora Waln was a Quaker writer and journalist who became widely known in the 1930s through 1950s for books and magazine pieces drawn from her years in China and Germany. She attended Swarthmore College but left during her second year when World War I broke out, and in 1920 she sailed to China, where she lived with the Lin family in Hopei Province.
Waln wrote with the authority of lived experience. Her best-known books include The House of Exile, based on her life in Germany, and Reaching for the Stars, drawn from her stay in a Chinese household. She also contributed to magazines including The Atlantic Monthly and The Saturday Evening Post, and she was noted for reporting early on the rise of Nazism.
Archive records and reference sources remember her as a 20th-century Quaker author whose papers preserve both published work and unfinished manuscripts. She died on September 27, 1964.