Pearl S. Buck

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and humanitarian whose life was divided between the United States and China. She was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia, to Southern Presbyterian missionary parents, Caroline Maude Stulting and Absalom Sydenstricker. When she was still an infant, her family returned to China, where she grew up first in Huai’an and then in Zhenjiang, near Nanjing. That early crossing of cultures shaped nearly everything that followed in her work.

Buck is best known for The Good Earth, the novel that became the best-selling book in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, honored for her “rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China” and for her memoir-biographies of her missionary parents. Her fiction drew on places she knew closely, including the Anhui region where she lived after marrying John Lossing Buck in 1917.

Her childhood gave her two ways of seeing the world. In her memoir, she remembered living in “several worlds”: the small Presbyterian world of her parents and the larger Chinese world around her. She was raised bilingually, taught English by her mother, the local dialect by Chinese playmates, and classical Chinese by a scholar named Mr. Kung. Her parents believed Chinese people were their equals and forbade the use of the word “heathen.” At the same time, the Boxer Uprising affected the family deeply, and her later schooling in Shanghai exposed her to racist attitudes among other Western students.

Buck left China in 1911 to study at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1914. She returned to China after learning that her mother was seriously ill, and from 1914 to 1932 she served as a Presbyterian missionary. She and John Lossing Buck later lived in Nanjing, where both taught at the University of Nanking; she also taught at Ginling College and the National Central University. Over time, she came to doubt the need for foreign missions, and her views became controversial during the Fundamentalist-modernist controversy, leading to her resignation.

Personal hardship also entered her work and public life. Her daughter Carol was born in 1920 with phenylketonuria, leaving her severely developmentally disabled, and Buck later needed money for Carol’s specialized care. The Nanking Incident of 1927 forced Buck and her family into hiding in a poor Chinese family’s hut before they were rescued by American gunboats. After returning to the United States in 1935, she married publisher Richard J. Walsh and kept writing at a high pace. She also became an advocate for the rights of women, racial equality, and Asian and mixed-race adoption. Her words continue to matter because they came from close observation, lived conflict, and a steady concern for people separated by class, race, nation, and custom.