Pearl S. Buck was one of the most widely read American writers of the twentieth century and the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia, she spent most of her first four decades in China and used that experience to interpret Chinese peasant life for Western readers. Her 1931 novel The Good Earth made her famous, won the Pulitzer Prize, and helped shape how a generation of Americans understood China. Beyond literature she became a determined humanitarian, founding organizations that still work with children of mixed Asian and American heritage.
Her parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries who had already lost children to disease in China. They were home on furlough when Pearl was born; they took her back to China when she was five months old. She grew up in Zhenjiang (then called Chinkiang) near the Yangtze River, speaking Chinese as readily as English, playing with Chinese children, and receiving tutoring in Confucian classics from a scholar named Mr. Kung. Her mother taught her English literature and insisted on weekly writing exercises. At six her first piece appeared in a Shanghai newspaper. Summers were spent at the family villa in the mountain resort of Kuling. The Boxer Uprising of 1900 forced the family to flee; later the 1927 Nanking Incident would again put them in danger. These years of bilingual, bicultural childhood gave Buck an unusual intimacy with ordinary Chinese life that few Western writers possessed.
In 1910 she returned to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, graduating in 1914 with a degree in philosophy. She taught psychology for a semester, then went back to China to care for her ailing mother. In 1917 she married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural economist. The couple lived for several years in rural Anhui province, where Pearl observed the hardships of peasant farmers—the material that would later become The Good Earth. Their only biological child, Carol, was born in 1920 and was later diagnosed with phenylketonuria, which caused severe intellectual disability. After a hysterectomy following the birth, Buck could have no more children of her own. Carol was eventually placed at the Vineland Training School in New Jersey. The couple also adopted a daughter, Janice. Buck later wrote about Carol in the 1950 memoir The Child Who Never Grew, an early public discussion of intellectual disability.
Financial pressure and the desire to pay for Carol’s care pushed Buck toward professional writing. After earning a master’s degree in English at Cornell in 1925, she began publishing stories. Her first novel, East Wind: West Wind (1930), examined the clash between traditional and modern China. The following year The Good Earth appeared. The story of Wang Lung, a poor farmer whose fortunes rise and then decay, became the best-selling book in the United States in both 1931 and 1932. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1935. Sequels Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935) completed the House of Earth trilogy. A 1937 film adaptation further widened the book’s audience. In 1938 the Swedish Academy awarded Buck the Nobel Prize “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces,” referring also to the paired biographies of her parents, The Exile and Fighting Angel (both 1936). She was the first American woman so honored.
Buck left China for good in 1934 amid political turmoil and growing doubts about the missionary enterprise; a 1932 speech questioning the need for foreign missions had already strained her relationship with the Presbyterian board. In 1935 she divorced John Buck and married her publisher, Richard J. Walsh. They settled at Green Hills Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and together adopted six more children, several of them of mixed race. Walsh died in 1960. Over her lifetime Buck published more than seventy books—novels, short-story collections, biographies, autobiographies, children’s books, essays, and a translation of the Chinese classic Water Margin (All Men Are Brothers). Later novels such as Dragon Seed (1942), Pavilion of Women (1946), Peony (1948), and Imperial Woman (1956) continued her exploration of East-West encounter and women’s lives. She also wrote under the pseudonym John Sedges for several American-set novels. Critics sometimes dismissed her prose as repetitive or overly popular, yet her books sold millions of copies and were translated widely.
Fame never separated Buck from activism. She wrote for the NAACP’s Crisis and the Urban League’s Opportunity, served as a trustee of Howard University, and spoke against racial discrimination at a time when such views were still controversial. In 1941 she and Walsh founded the East and West Association to promote cultural understanding. After World War II she was outraged that American adoption agencies routinely rejected mixed-race Asian children fathered by U.S. servicemen. In 1949 she established Welcome House, the first international interracial adoption agency; it placed thousands of children. In 1964 she created the Pearl S. Buck Foundation (now Pearl S. Buck International) to sponsor children who could not be adopted overseas, supporting health, education, and vocational training in several Asian countries. She donated a large share of her earnings to these causes. Her Pennsylvania farm became both family home and organizational headquarters and is now a National Historic Landmark.
The Chinese Communist government barred her from returning after 1949 and denounced her as a cultural imperialist; she was also denied permission to accompany President Nixon on his 1972 visit. In her final years she faced a public scandal involving a close advisor accused of mismanaging foundation funds, though she defended him until her death. Buck died of lung cancer on March 6, 1973, in Danby, Vermont, two months before her eighty-first birthday. She is buried at Green Hills Farm beneath a tombstone inscribed with her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhu.
Buck’s literary reputation has fluctuated. Academic critics have often preferred more experimental modernists, yet The Good Earth remains in print and continues to introduce readers to a China that is neither exotic stereotype nor political abstraction. Her greater, quieter achievement may be the institutions she built and the thousands of children whose lives they changed. She insisted that sympathy could cross racial and national lines and that literature and practical action belonged together. That combination of storytelling and humanitarian work still defines her place in American letters.