PEARL S. BUCK (1892 – 1973)

Author Pearl S Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker on June 26, 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Her parents were Presbyterian missionaries who returned with Pearl Buck to their station in Chinkiang, China, five months after her birth. Buck’s early education consisted of tutoring with mother, who insisted the child write something every week. Her first published work appeared in the Shanghai Mercury, an English-language newspaper with a weekly children’s edition. Pearl was then 5 years old.

Buck attended boarding school in Shanghai at age 15; two years later she returned to the United States to study at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia. While at college she wrote for the school newspaper, earned two literary prizes, and was elected president of her class. She received a bachelor’s degree in 1914 and was invited to teach psychology at the college. She did so for one semester, but then returned to China to nurse her mother through an illness. In 1917 she married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural teacher. The couple spent their first five years together living in a small town in North China. Buck’s memories of life in this region became the basis for her best-known work The Good Earth.

She wrote the story, which grew into her first novel, East Wind: West Wind, in 1925 aboard a ship while traveling to the United States to study for her master’s degree at Cornell University. On the advice of a teacher at Cornell, she sent the story to Asia Magazine, which published it as “A Chinese Woman Speaks.” East Wind: West Wind was published in April 1930 and was in its third printing when The Good Earth was published on March 2, 1931.

The Good Earth was praised by critics and stood on the best-seller list for more than 21 months. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the best novel by an American author in 1932 as has been printed in more than 30 languages, including Chinese. In 1938, Pearl Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for her epic portrayal of Chinese peasant life in several of her novels and for the biographies of her parents. She was the first American female writer to be awarded both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes.

From her early successes Pearl Buck went on to become a prolific writer, publishing more than 120 books, over 100 short stories, 10 children’s books and numerous non-fiction articles. She penned most of her work at Green Hills Farm, her American homestead in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania.
In addition to her many literary achievements, Pearl Buck was a driving force in humanitarian causes. She was a longtime advocate of cross-cultural understanding and racial harmony as a means of achieving world peace. As early as the 1930’s, she was a vocal supporter of improved race relations in the United States. She fought prejudice wherever she found it.

In 1941 she founded and led the East and West Association, devoted to fostering understanding between peoples. In 1949, she established Welcome House, Inc., an adoption agency that finds homes and parents for children of mixed heredity. The organization has had a liberalizing influence on the field of adoption. In 1963, at the age of 73, she established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation and devoted her remaining years to helping children around the world who have been displaced due to mixed heredity, war, hunger, poverty or other circumstances. The foundation focuses on the plight of thousands of Amerasians — born to American fathers and Asian mothers — who are not citizens of either county and suffer discrimination because of their mixed heritage. In October 1991, The Pearl S. Buck Foundation and Welcome House Adoption Services united as one agency.

Buck and her second husband, Richard Walsh, who was also her publisher at the John Day Company, raised a large international family at Green Hills Farm. The couple raised nine children (seven were legally adopted) of various ethnic origins and mixed heredity. Buck’s only natural child suffered from phenylketonuria, resulting in mental retardation and institutionalization. The writer helped publicize the cause of the mentally challenged by publishing the story of her personal experiences in The Child Who Never Grew (1950).