Pearl S. Buck (June 26,1892—March 6, 1973) was anAmerican writer. She lived inChina for over 20 of 40 years and wrote about the country. Her bookThe Good Earth was abestseller in 1931 and 1932. The book won aPulitzer Prize in 1932.
She won the 1938Nobel Prize in Literature for a trilogy of novels about a Chinese farm family and biographies about her missionary parents. When she returned to the United States, she became active in charitable and political causes.
Buck was born inHillsboro,West Virginia. The letter "S" in her name, "Pearl S. Buck", stands for "Sydenstricker" because her father was named Absalom Sydenstricker. He was aChristianPresbyterianmissionary to China, so Buck went to China a little while after she was born.[1] She lived in China until 1934.
Buck learned both Chinese andEnglish. Her mother taught her English, and a tutor taught herChinese language.[2] When she lived in China, theBoxer Rebellion, in 1900-1901, changed her life and her family's life. Chinese friends stopped being their friends, and people from Europe and America came less to China to visit.
In the early 1900s, Buck went to America to attend college. She went toRandolph-Macon Woman's College inLynchburg,Virginia.[3] She finished college in 1914. She then became aPresbyterian missionary like her father and returned to China. She left the missionary life in 1933, after theFundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, where Fundamentalists (people who thought theChristianBible should be taught as it was and that ideas such asDarwinism were wrong) and Modernists (people who thoughtDarwinism was okay) in the Presbyterian church did not like each other.[4]
Buck went back to China in 1914. She married a missionary namedJohn Lossing Buck in 1917. In 1920, they had a daughter. She was named Carol. Carol hadPhenylketonuria, a disorder that can causemental retardation.
Buck was not just a missionary in China. She did other work too. Buck and her family lived in Nanjing from 1920 to 1933. There is a college calledNanjing University in the city. That was where Buck's family lived. Pearl taughtEnglish Literature in two different colleges which would later become part of Nanjing University. Those colleges were theUniversity of Nanjing and theNational Central University. Buck's mother died in 1921 of a disease calledsprue. Pearl went back to America in 1924 and got aMasters Degree fromCornell University in 1924. Pearl's family went back to China in 1925.[4]
Something called theNanjing Incident, where soldiers of two armies fighting for the control of China attacked Nanjing, happened in 1927. Pearl had to hide from the soldiers. Pearl nearly died. AmericanNavy ships rescued her. Pearl's family moved back to China a year after the Nanjing Incident happened. Then she started to write. She wrote because she needed money to support her family. In 1929, Pearl and her family went back to America to get Carol medical care. In America, her first book was published. It was calledEast Wind: West Wind. It was accepted for publication by a man named Richard Walsh, with whom Buck would later live after she left her husband. She went back toNanjing later in 1929, and then she started to writeThe Good Earth. She finished the book in less than one year.[5]
Buck divorced her husband in 1935. Richard Walsh helped her with the divorce, and she lived with him inPennsylvania until hedied in 1960.[5] Buck died on March 6, 1973 oflung cancer inDanby,Vermont. She designed her tombstone. It had her birth name on it in Chinese.[7]
Pearl did not like how adoption worked in America. The adoption companies in 1949 thought Asian children and children withmixed races were not able to be adopted. Pearl did not like that. Pearl createdWelcome House, which was the first adoption company that had adoption internationally (between two different countries) and interracially (between races).[8] However, some Asian kids were not able to be adopted. This led Pearl to create the Pearl S. Buck Foundation in 1964 to help those kids.[9] It was later renamedPearl S. Buck International. A year later she opened theOpportunity House (first called the Opportunity Center and Orphanage) inSouth Korea. Offices of the Opportunity House were later opened inThailand,Vietnam, and thePhilippines. She made Opportunity house to help Asian kids who were not able to live like other children.[10]
Her books were reviewed a lot. She got many positive reviews. One person said she had "beautiful prose" (prose is how a person writes something) but also said her style makes reading her books hard sometime.[11] Some people like how Pearl's books made Americans understand more how Chinese people lived.[12] The books Pearl wrote made Americans like China more and also made Americans likeJapan less.[13]
The Good Earth was Buck's most popular book. It was a bestseller in 1931 and 1932. In 1932, Buck won thePulitzer Prize forThe Good Earth. She wrote many other books andshort stories. She wrote biographies (a biography is a story about the life of someone) about her parents. In 1938, she won theNobel Prize in Literature for her biographies and her trilogy.[16]
↑Liao, Kang (1997).Pearl S. Buck: a cultural bridge across the Pacific. Greenwood. p.4.ISBN978-0-313-30146-9.
↑William L. O'Neill,A Democracy At War: America's Fight At Home and Abroad in World War II, p 57ISBN0-02-923678-9
↑National Postal Museum."Great Americans series".Pearl S. Buck 5 cent issue. Smithsonian Institution. Archived fromthe original on 20 September 2006. Retrieved7 March 2013.
