Pearl Buck

Biography

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973) was an American writer and humanitarian, and the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, she spent much of her early life in China with her parents, who were Presbyterian missionaries. This unique upbringing had a strong impact on her perspective and writing, giving her deep insight into Chinese peasant life, which became central to her most famous works.

Buck went to school at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and later attended Cornell University. She married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural economist, in 1917. The couple lived in rural China, where she saw firsthand the struggles faced by Chinese farmers. These experiences inspired her groundbreaking novel, The Good Earth, published in 1931. The book was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932, solidifying her status as a key literary figure.

With her literary success, Buck kept writing extensively about Chinese culture and society. Her works included East Wind: West Wind, Sons, and two biographical books about her parents, The Exile and Fighting Angel. These biographies, along with The Good Earth, were noted by the Nobel Committee when she received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938 for her "rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China."

After moving back permanently to the United States in 1935, Buck married publisher Richard J. Walsh and settled in Pennsylvania. She grew her humanitarian efforts, becoming an outspoken supporter of civil rights, women's rights, and global understanding. She started Welcome House, the first international adoption agency in the U.S., focusing on Asian and mixed-race children. Buck also created the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to help Amerasian children who couldn't be adopted. She continued writing and her activism until she passed away in Danby, Vermont, in 1973.