The Sand Pebbles is a 1966 American epic war film directed by Robert Wise in Panavision. It tells the story of an independent, rebellious U.S. Navy machinist's mate, first class, aboard the fictional river gunboat USS San Pablo, on Yangtze Patrol in 1920s China.
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.
Richard Donald Crenna was an American film, television and radio actor.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1963.
The USS Panay incident on December 12, 1937, was a Japanese bombing attack on the U.S. Navy river gunboat Panay and three Standard Oil Company tankers on the Yangtze River. Japan and the United States were not at war at the time. The boats were part of the American naval operation called the Yangtze Patrol, which began following the joint British, French, and American victory in The Second Opium War. Public reaction was mixed in the U.S., with the president weighing various diplomatic and military responses only to settle for an apology and compensation. The Japanese claimed that they did not see the U.S. flags painted on the deck of the gunboat. Tokyo officially apologized and paid a cash indemnity. The settlement mollified some of the U.S. anger, and newspapers called the matter closed.
William Riley Burnett was an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for the crime novel Little Caesar, the film adaptation of which is considered the first of the classic American gangster movies.
Rear Admiral Kemp Tolley was an officer in the U.S. Navy and is the author of three books and numerous articles on the history of U.S. Navy activities in the Pacific, China, and the Soviet Union.
Richard Milton McKenna was an American sailor and novelist. He was best known for his historical novel The Sand Pebbles, which tells the story of an American sailor serving aboard a gunboat on the Chinese Yangtze River in 1925.
A river gunboat is a type of gunboat adapted for river operations. River gunboats required shallow draft for river navigation. They would be armed with relatively small caliber cannons, or a mix of cannons and machine guns. If they carried more than one cannon, one might be a howitzer, for shore bombardment. They were usually not armoured. The fictional USS San Pablo described in Richard McKenna's The Sand Pebbles is an example of this class of vessel, serving on the US Navy's Yangtze Patrol. Stronger river warships with larger guns were river monitors.
The second USS Panay (PR–5) of the United States Navy was a Panay-class river gunboat that served on the Yangtze Patrol in China until being sunk by Japanese aircraft on 12 December 1937 on the Yangtze River.
The Yangtze Patrol, also known as the Yangtze River Patrol Force, Yangtze River Patrol, YangPat and ComYangPat, was a prolonged naval operation from 1854–1949 to protect American interests in the Yangtze River's treaty ports. The Yangtze Patrol also patrolled the coastal waters of China where they protected U.S. citizens, their property, and Christian missionaries.
William Julius Lederer, Jr. was an American author and naval officer.
This is a list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 1960s, as determined by Publishers Weekly. The list features the most popular novels of each year from 1960 through 1969.
Maia Teresa Wojciechowska was a Polish-American writer best known for children's and young adult fiction. Her first book and two books for adults were published under her married name Maia Rodman.
USS San Pablo may refer to:
Alice Tisdale Hobart born Alice Nourse in Lockport, New York, was an American novelist. Her most famous book, Oil for the Lamps of China, which was also made into a film, drew heavily on her experiences as the wife of an American oil executive in China amid the turmoil of the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1912.
USS Villalobos (PG-42) was a steel screw gunboat originally built for the Spanish Navy as Villalobos but captured by the United States Army in 1898 during the Spanish–American War and commissioned into the United States Navy in 1900. The ship spent almost all of her life as an American gunboat in the Yangtze Patrol on the Yangtze River.
J. B. Lippincott & Co. was an American publishing house founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1836 by Joshua Ballinger Lippincott. It was incorporated in 1885 as J. B. Lippincott Company.
The Harper Novel Prize was an award presented by Harper Brothers, an American publishing company located in New York City.
The Sand Pebbles is a 1962 novel about an American gunboat and its crew on the Yangtze River in the 1920s.
