Buck, Pearl

orig. Pearl Sydenstricker

(born June 26, 1892, Hillsboro, W.Va., U.S.—died March 6, 1973, Danby, Vt.) U.S. author. Buck was reared in China by her missionary parents and later taught in a Chinese university. Her first book to reach a wide audience was The Good Earth (1931, Pulitzer Prize), describing the struggles of a Chinese peasant and his slave wife. Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935) followed; the trilogy was published as The House of Earth (1935). Among her later works are short stories, novels (including five under the pseudonym John Sedges), and an autobiography. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.

Buck, Pearl (Comfort b. Sydenstricker) (1892–1973) author; born in Hillsboro, W.Va. She was raised among Chinese children by American missionary parents in Chinkiang, China, and apart from attending Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia, lived in China until she was 40. In 1922 she began writing on Chinese life for American magazines. Her second novel, The Good Earth (1931), won the Pulitzer Prize; still her best known book, it sold two million copies, established Buck as the foremost Western interpreter of China, and gained her the Nobel literature prize (1938). The literary establishment disdained Buck's prolificacy, sentimentality, and didacticism, and many of Buck's 80 volumes of novels, translations, and memoirs quickly faded; her Chinese fiction in particular lost its immediacy after her move to the U.S.A. (1935); nevertheless, she engendered widespread sympathetic public awareness of China. She established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation (1964) and sponsored humanitarian work on behalf of Asian-American and retarded children.