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Pearl S. Buck
Pearl Buck, ca. 1932.
Born	June 26, 1892(1892-06-26) Hillsboro, West Virginia, United States
Died	March 6, 1973 (aged 80) Danby, Vermont, United States
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	American
Subjects	China
Debut works	East Wind:West Wind

Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, most familiarly known as Pearl S. Buck (birth name Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker; Chinese: 赛珍珠; pinyin: Sài Zhēnzhū) (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973), was a prolific American writer who won a Nobel Prize in Literature and a Pulitzer Prize.

Contents 1 Life 2 Home 3 Humanitarian efforts 4 Illustrators 5 Selected bibliography 5.1 Novels 5.2 Biographies 5.3 Autobiographies 5.4 Non-fiction 5.5 Stories 6 See also 6.1 Awards 7 References 8 Notes 9 External links

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia to Caroline (Stulting; 1857-1921) and Absalom Sydenstricker, a Southern Presbyterian missionary. The family was sent to Zhenjiang, China in 1892 when Pearl was 3 months old. She was raised in China and learned the customs from a teacher named Mr. Kung. She was taught English as a second language by her mother and tutor. She was encouraged to write things at an early age. The Boxer Rebellion greatly affected Pearl Buck and her family. Buck wrote that during this time, “…her eight-year-old childhood … split apart.” Her Chinese friends deserted her and her family, and there were not as many Western visitors as there once were. “The streets [of China] were alive with rumors- many … based on fact- of brutality to missionaries …” Buck’s father was a missionary, so Buck’s mother, her little sister, and herself were “…evacuated to the relative safety of Shanghai, where they spent nearly a year as refugees…” (The Good Earth, Introduction) In July 1901, Buck and her family sailed to San Francisco. Not until the following year did the Sydenstrickers return to China.

In 1910, she left China once again for America to attend Randolph-Macon Woman's College ^[1], where she would earn her degree (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1914. She then returned to China and married an agricultural economist, John Lossing Buck, on May 13, 1917. In 1920, she and John had a daughter, Carol, who was afflicted with phenylketonuria. The small family then moved to Nanjing, where Pearl taught English literature at the University of Nanking. In 1925, the Bucks adopted Janice (later surnamed Walsh). In 1926, she left China and returned to the United States for a short time in order to earn her Masters degree from Cornell University.

From 1920 to 1933, Pearl and John made their home in Nanking (Nanjing), on the campus of Nanking University, where both had teaching positions. In 1921, Pearl's mother died, and shortly afterwards her father moved in with the Bucks. The tragedies and dislocations which Pearl suffered in the 1920s reached a climax in March 1927, in the violence known as the "Nanking Incident." In a confused battle involving elements of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops, Communist forces, and assorted warlords, several Westerners were murdered. The Bucks spent a terrified day in hiding, after which they were rescued by American gunboats. After a trip downriver to Shanghai, the Buck family sailed to Unzen, Japan, where they spent the following year. They then moved back to Nanking, though conditions remained dangerously unsettled.

Buck wrote about her experiences in China from her home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In 1935, she bought a sixty-acre homestead she called Green Hills Farm and moved into the hundred year-old farmhouse on the property with her second husband and their family of six children.

Green Hills Farm is where Buck spent thirty-eight years of her life, raising her family, writing, pursuing humanitarian interests, and gardening. She completed many works while living in Pennsylvania, such as This Proud Heart (1938), The Patriot (1939), Today and Forever (1941), and The Child Who Never Grew (1950).

Buck was an extremely passionate activist for human rights. In 1949, outraged that existing adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable, Pearl established Welcome House, Inc., the first international, interracial adoption agency. In the nearly five decades of its work, Welcome House has assisted in the placement of more than five thousand children. In 1964, to provide support for Asian-American children who were not eligible for adoption, Buck also established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which provides sponsorship funding for thousands of children in half a dozen Asian countries. When establishing the Opportunity House Foundation to support child sponsorship programs in Asia, Buck said, "The purpose...is to publicize and eliminate injustices and prejudices suffered by children, who, because of their birth, are not permitted to enjoy the educational, social, economic and civil privileges normally accorded to children. She adopted one of the children,from named Julie, who is now a 6 grade math teacher at Indian valley middle school."^[2]

While the historic site works to preserve and display artifacts from her profoundly multicultural life, many of Buck's life experiences are also described in her novels, short stories, fiction, and children's stories. Through them she sought to prove to her readers that universality of mankind can exist if man accepts it. She dealt with many topics including women's rights, emotions (in general), Asian cultures, immigration, adoption, and conflicts that many people go through in life.

Pearl S. Buck died of lung cancer on March 6, 1973 in Danby, Vermont and was interred in Green Hills Farm in Perkasie.

This section may stray from the topic of the article into the topic of another article, John Alan Maxwell. Please help improve this section or discuss this issue on the talk page. (help)

Noted illustrator John Alan Maxwell illustrated The Exile and Fighting Angel. The portrait of her father on the cover of Fighting Angel appears in the November 29, 1936 edition of the New York Times with the caption "From the portrait by John Alan Maxwell for the Jacket of "Fighting Angel."^[3]

• East Wind:West Wind (1930)
• The Good Earth (1931)
• Sons (1933)
• The Mother (1933)
• A House Divided (1935)
• This Proud Heart (1938)
• The Big Wave (1938)
• The Patriot (1939)
• Other Gods (1940)
• China Sky (1941)
• Dragon Seed (1942)
• The Promise (1943)
• Portrait of a Marriage (1945)
• Pavilion of Women (1946)
• The Angry Wife (1947) (as John Sedges)
• Peony (1948)
• A Long Love (1949) (as John Sedges)
• God's Men (1951)
• Come, My Beloved (1953)
• Voices in the House (1953) ( as John Sedges)
• Imperial Woman (1956)
• Letter from Peking(1957)
• Command the Morning (1959)
• Satan Never Sleeps (1962)
• The Living Reed (1963)
• The Time is Noon (1966)
• Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (1967)
• The Three Daughters of Madame Liang (1969)
• Mandala (1970)
• The Goddess Abides (1972)
• The Rainbow (1974)

Note: The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided were released together in 1935 as The House of Earth trilogy.
"The Townsman" was written under the nom de plume, John Sedges.

• The Exile (1936)
• Fighting Angel (1936)

• My Several Worlds (1954)
• A Bridge For Passing (1962)

• China as I See It (1970)
• The Story Bible (1971)
• Pearl S. Buck's Oriental Cookbook (1972)
• Of Men and Women (1941)
• The Child Who Never Grew (1950)
• My Several Worlds (1954)
• For Spacious Skies (1966)
• The People of Japan (1966)
• The Kennedy Women (1970)

The Old Demon

• 19th Century Protestant Missions in China

• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (1932)
• Nobel Prize in Literature (1938)

• Peter J. Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
• Elizabeth Johnston Lipscomb, Frances E. Webb Peter J. Conn, eds., The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a Centennial Symposium, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, March 26-28, 1992 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994)
• Liao Kang, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge across the Pacific (Westport, CT, London: Greenwood Press, 1997)
• Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)
• Pearl Buck's Portrait of Her Fighting Missionary Father (NY Times, November 29, 1936.)

1. ^ Randolph-Macon Woman's College
2. ^ Pearl S. Buck International: Our History
3. ^ Pearl Buck's Portrait of Her Fighting Missionary Father, (New York Times, November 29, 1936.)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2007)

• Pearl S. Buck International Website
• University of Pennsylvania website dedicated to Pearl S. Buck
• Brief biography at the official Nobel Prize website
• Brief biography
• Brief biography at Kirjasto (Pegasos)
• Buck at IMDb
• National Trust for Historic Preservation on the Pearl S. Buck House Restoration
• The Pearl S. Buck Foundation, Taipei, Taiwan (Republic of China)
• Pearl S. Buck burial information from FindAGrave.com
• Finding Aid for the Pearl S. Buck Letter, 1943 The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

v • d • e Nobel Laureates in Literature
Grazia Deledda (1926) • Henri Bergson (1927) • Sigrid Undset (1928) • Thomas Mann (1929) • Sinclair Lewis (1930) • Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1931) • John Galsworthy (1932) • Ivan Bunin (1933) • Luigi Pirandello (1934) • Eugene O'Neill (1936) • Roger Martin du Gard (1937) • Pearl S. Buck (1938) • Frans Eemil Sillanpää (1939) • Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1944) • Gabriela Mistral (1945) • Hermann Hesse (1946) • André Gide (1947) • T. S. Eliot (1948) • William Faulkner (1949) • Bertrand Russell (1950)
Complete roster | (1901–1925) | (1926–1950) | (1951–1975) | (1976-2000) | (2001–2025)