Pearl S. Buck

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia, to Southern Presbyterian missionaries. She was not yet five months old when her parents carried her to China. She grew up in Zhenjiang — then called Chinkiang — on the Yangtze River, speaking Chinese before she spoke English. Her closest companion was her Chinese amah, a nurse who filled her childhood with Chinese folk tales, ghost stories, and the rhythms of daily life in a world that was not quite her own and not quite foreign.

In 1911, at the age of eighteen, Buck sailed to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia. The America she found was as foreign to her as China was to most Americans. Her classmates found her Chinese gowns exotic; she found their customs incomprehensible. She graduated in 1914 and returned to China immediately — it was, she later wrote, the only home she knew.

Marriage and Rural China

In 1917, she married John Lossing Buck, an American agricultural missionary. He was a gentle, scholarly man whose work took them deep into the countryside of Anhui province. It was here, in the villages of northern China, that Pearl Buck saw the Chinese peasant at close range — the poverty, the backbreaking labor, the dignity, the fatalism. The farmers she met, the women she watched working in the fields, the families that barely survived each winter — they would become Wang Lung and O-lan.

Grief and the Writing

Her first child, Carol, was born in 1920 with phenylketonuria, a metabolic disorder that caused severe intellectual disability. Buck was devastated. She placed Carol in an institution in America and rarely spoke of her afterward, but the grief never left her. It seeped into her writing — into the quiet suffering of O-lan, into the fierce love Wang Lung feels for his children even when they disappoint him. In the attic of their house in Nanjing, amid a crumbling marriage and a collapsing country, Pearl Buck sat down and wrote The Good Earth.

The Good Earth and Its Aftermath

Published in 1931 by the John Day Company, The Good Earth was an immediate sensation. The reading public, still reeling from the Depression, recognized something universal in Wang Lung's struggle. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, spent two years on the bestseller lists, and sold millions of copies worldwide. In 1938, Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.” She was the first American woman to receive the honor.

A Complicated Legacy

Buck's relationship with China became increasingly fraught. She had been initially sympathetic to Mao Zedong's Communists, hoping their revolution would help the peasants she loved. She later became fiercely anti-communist, denouncing the regime's brutality. The Chinese Communist government banned her books and prevented her from ever returning. For decades, she was a non-person in the country where she had grown up.

The Later Years

Over her lifetime, Buck wrote more than a hundred books — novels, biographies, children's stories, translations. She founded Welcome House, the first international interracial adoption agency, and became an outspoken advocate for women's rights and racial tolerance — causes that were deeply unfashionable in the America of the 1940s and 1950s. She raised seven adopted children and one biological daughter. She died on March 6, 1973, in Danby, Vermont, at the age of eighty. A statue of her now stands in Zhenjiang — the city where she first learned to love China.