Pearl S. Buck (1892 - 1973) was an American writer who spent most of the first forty years of her life in China and drew on that experience in more than seventy books. [1] Her novel The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and in 1938 she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. [2] She was also a prominent campaigner for civil rights, women's rights and interracial adoption.
Early life in China
Pearl Sydenstricker was born on 26 June 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, while her parents, Presbyterian missionaries, were on leave from China. [1] She was taken back to Zhenjiang at a few months old and grew up bilingual in English and Chinese, taught at home by her mother and by a Chinese tutor.
She and her family survived the Boxer Uprising of 1900 by taking refuge in Shanghai. [1] She returned to the United States for higher education at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia, graduating in 1914, and later took a master's degree at Cornell University. In 1917 she married the agricultural economist John Lossing Buck and lived with him in a poor farming district of Anhui province, the source of her best-known fiction.
Writing career
Buck taught English literature at the University of Nanking and began publishing in American magazines in the 1920s. Her first novel, East Wind: West Wind, appeared in 1930. [2]
The Good Earth followed in 1931, tracing the farmer Wang Lung and his wife O-Lan from poverty to wealth and the moral costs of that rise. [3] It was the best-selling novel in the United States in both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize, and was adapted for the stage and in 1937 for a successful film. She extended the story into the trilogy The House of Earth with Sons and A House Divided, and published an English translation of the classical Chinese novel Shui Hu Zhuan as All Men Are Brothers.
In 1938 the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize in Literature for her rich and epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces, the latter referring to the accounts of her parents published as The Exile and Fighting Angel. [4] The award was contested by some American critics who regarded her work as popular rather than literary; her international readership was nevertheless enormous.
Public life and activism
Buck left China permanently in 1934 as conditions deteriorated, settling in Pennsylvania after divorcing and marrying her publisher, Richard Walsh. [1] She wrote prolifically, including novels published under the pen name John Sedges.
She campaigned against racial segregation, supported women's rights, and worked on behalf of children with disabilities after her daughter Carol was found to have phenylketonuria. [2] In 1949 she founded Welcome House, the first international interracial adoption agency, after finding that children of mixed Asian and American parentage were considered unadoptable, and in 1964 established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to assist such children in Asia.
Later life and legacy
Buck published steadily until her death, producing more than forty novels along with biographies, children's books, essays and translations. She died in Danby, Vermont, on 6 March 1973. [1]
Her reputation has been reassessed more favourably in recent decades, particularly for the role her work played in shaping American attitudes towards China before and during the Second World War, and for her early and sustained advocacy on race and adoption. [3] Her Pennsylvania home is a National Historic Landmark.
