Pearl S. Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She spent her youth in China, in Chinkiang on the Yangtse River. She learned to speak Chinese before she could speak English. Her parents were missionaries. Buck’s father, Absalom Sydenstricker, was a humorless, scholarly man who spent years translating the Bible from Greek to Chinese. Her mother, the former Caroline Stulting, had travelled widely in her youth and had a fondness for literature.
After being educated by her mother and by a Chinese tutor, who was a Confucian scholar, Buck was sent to a boarding school in Shanghai (1907-09) at the age of fifteen. She also worked for the Door of Hope, a shelter for Chinese slave girls and prostitutes. Buck continued her education in the United States at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia, where she studied psychology. After graduating in 1914, she returned to China as a teacher for the Presbyterian Board of Missions. Her mother was seriously ill and Buck spent two years taking care of her.
Buck married Dr. John Lossing Buck, an agricultural expert, devoted to his work. When her mother recovered, they settled in a village in the North China. Buck worked as a teacher and interpreter for her husband and travelled through the countryside. During this period China took steps toward liberal reform, especially through the May 4th Movement of 1917 to 1921. In the 1920s the Bucks moved to Nanking, where she taught English and American literature at the university. In 1924 she returned to the United States to seek medical care for her first daughter, who was mentally retarded. In 1926 she received her M.A. in literature from Cornell University.
The Bucks went back to China in 1927. During the civil war, they were evacuated to Japan—Buck never returned to China. In 1935 Buck divorced her first husband and married her publisher and the president of John Day Company, Richard Walsh, with whom she moved to Pennsylvania.
As a writer Buck started with the novel East Wind: West Wind (1930), which received critical recognition. She had earlier published autobiographical writings in magazines and a story entitled ‘A Chinese Woman Speaks’ in the Asia Magazine. Her breakthrough novel, The Good Earth, appeared in 1931. Its style, a combination of biblical prose and the Chinese narrative saga, increased the dignity of its characters. The book gained a wide audience, and was made into a motion picture.
In 1936 Buck was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She became in 1938 the third American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, following Sinclair Lewis and Eugene O’Neill. In 1951 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. During World War II she lectured and wrote on democracy and American attitudes toward Asia. Through her personal experiences, Buck had much first-hand knowledge of the relationships between men and women from different cultures. In her books one of the major themes was interracial love. In The Angry Wife (1949) she wrote about the love of Bettina, a former slave, and Tom, a southerner who fought for the army of the North. In The Hidden Flower (1952) a Japanese family is overset when the daughter falls in love with an American soldier.
Buck and Walsh were active in humanitarian causes through the East and West Association, which was devoted to mutual understanding between the peoples of Asia and the United States, Welcome House, and The Pearl Buck Foundation. A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, and Paul Robeson, she also advocated the rights of women and racial equality before the civil rights movement. As a consequence of these activities, the F.B.I. kept detailed files on her for years.
After the communist revolution in China, Buck became disillusioned about the chances for international cooperation. The Patriot (1939) focused on the emotional development of an university student, whose idealism is crushed by the brutalities of war. Buck gradually shifted her activities to a lifelong concern for children. Buck’s own family included nine adopted children as well as her biological daughters. The Child Who Never Grew (1950) told a personal story of her own daughter, whose mental development stopped at the age of four. The subject is also dealt with in Buck’s famous novel The Good Earth. The book was filmed in 1937.
The Good Earth (1931) sold 1,800,000 copies in its first year. It has been translated into more than thirty languages and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1932. The novel was followed by two sequels, Sons (1932), which focused on the youngest son, Wang the Tiger, and A House Divided (1935), which was Yuan’s story. The three novels were published in 1935 in one volume as The House Of Earth. At her death Buck was working on ‘The Red Earth’, a further sequel to The Good Earth, presenting the modern-day descendants of that novel’s characters.
After Walsh’s death, Buck formed a relationship with Ted Harris, a dance instructor 40 years her junior, who took charge of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. Buck died at the age of eighty in Danby, Vermont, on March 6, 1973. Her manuscripts and papers are at the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation.
