Pearl S. Buck

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, to Southern Presbyterian missionaries who took her to China as a five-month-old infant. She grew up chiefly in Zhenjiang, bilingual from childhood, taught English by her mother and classical Chinese by a tutor, and later recalled living in “several worlds” — the small Presbyterian one of her parents and the larger Chinese one beyond it. After graduating from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia she returned to China, married the agricultural economist John Lossing Buck, and lived for years in Nanjing.

She served as a missionary, but came to doubt the need for foreign missions, and the controversy her views provoked led to her resignation. Her first novel, East Wind: West Wind, appeared in 1930; the next year The Good Earth, the story of the farmer Wang Lung and his wife O-lan, became the best-selling novel in the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize. Its sequels, Sons and A House Divided, completed the trilogy The House of Earth. In 1936 she published companion portraits of her parents: The Exile, about her mother, and Fighting Angel, about her father.

Buck returned to the United States in the mid-1930s and married her publisher, Richard J. Walsh. In 1938 she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, honoured both for her novels of Chinese peasant life and for the two biographies. She wrote prolifically for the rest of her life and campaigned for civil rights, the rights of women and the adoption of Asian and mixed-race children, founding the adoption agency Welcome House. She died in Danby, Vermont, in 1973.