Pearl Sydenstricker Buck was a popular twentieth century American novelist. Her notable works include the bestselling novel, The Good Earth for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In honor of her contribution to literature she was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck was raised by Southern Presbyterian missionary parents. Her family returned to China three months after her birth. In a few years they began to feel ostracized by the locals with the advent of Boxer Uprising. Due to safety concerns Buck’s family moved to Shanghai except for her father. Afterwards, she attended a local school where she was again shunned by the fellow students and became a victim of racism. Although, she did not have much contact with English speaking families, she grew up to be a bilingual. She learned English from her mother and Chinese from her playmates. Even though her father did not approve of her reading novels, she was a voracious reader of Dickens’s works.
Buck returned to U.S to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1911. Upon graduating Phi Beta Kappa, she followed her parent’s footsteps as she became a Presbyterian missionary. On her return to China, she married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural economist missionary. They both taught at the University of Nanking and shared campus accommodation. Buck taught English literature at a few institutions, such as Ginling College and National Central University. A series of tragic events transpired after her daughter’s birth, leading up to a reign of terror her family suffered during “Nanking Incident”.
In 1927, Buck embarked on a sincere writing vocation as her marriage threatened to fall apart and in order to provide for her ill daughter. She completed her first novel and presented it to a U. S publication John Day Publishers. The editor of the publication, Richard Walsh, accepted the manuscript and published her debut novel East Wind: West Wind, in 1930. After her divorce, she married to Walsh, who perpetually supported her writing career.
East Wind: West Wind is about a Chinese woman and the changes her family undergo. The book also discusses the cross-cultural issues regarding marriage. The success of her first novel encouraged her to pen her next novel within a span of a year. The Good Earth is considered to be a milestone in Buck’s lifelong writing career. Published in 1931, the novel illustrates the life of a family living in a Pre-World-War-I Chinese village. Her literary work instantly gained popularity and earned her William Dean Howells Medal and the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.
Subsequently, she turned the bestselling Wang family story into a trilogy, writing two more sequels; Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935). She also translated the Chinese novel Shui Hu Chuan in English as All Men are Brothers. Moreover, she wrote biographies of her parents, titled The Exile and Fighting Angel. Her semi-autobiographical novel, The Time Is Now (1967), details the author’s emotional experiences as she faced hardships of life. The major themes of her novels deal with the conflicted relationship between East and West. Some of her other novels, such as Welcome House, Inc. and The Child Who Never Grew, highlight her services in many welfare organizations tending to Eastern families and children. Pearl Buck died of lung cancer in 1973 in Pennsylvania, where she was buried with her self-designed tombstone with her name inscribed in Chinese.
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