Author Profile: Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck

BIO

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892 in the West Virginia home of her grandmother. She was born the fourth of seven children to Caroline and Absalom, two Presbyterian missionaries, who were home from China. The family quickly returned to their home in Chinkiang, China three months after Pearls birth. Pearl grew up among the Chinese peasants in a small farming community. Her first language was Chinese, she grew up with the customs and traditions of the Chinese. As she grew her mother and her teacher taught her English.

In 1910, Pearl returned to the United States to earn a degree at Randolph-Macon Womens College in Lynchburg, Virginia. She studied philosophy and was very active in the student government. She was elected class president and was a Phi Beta Kappa. After her graduation in 1914, she stayed at Randolph-Macon to teach psychology. After one semester she returned to China to assist her ill mother.

Pearl married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural missionary, in China on May 13, 1917. The couple led a very unhappy life together. In 1921, Pearl gave birth to a daughter, Carol, who was mentally disabled with a disease called PKU. Pearl decided to return to the States and place her in a full-time care facility in Vineland, New Jersey. Because of a tumor found in Pearl's uterus during delivery, she underwent a hysterectomy.

From 1920-1933, the Bucks lived in Nanking on the campus of the university where they both taught. Pearl published her first work in 1923, a nonfiction article for Atlantic magazine titled "In China too." In 1925, while studying at Cornell University, she wrote an article titled "A Chinese Woman Speaks" which would later be the impetus for her first novel EAST WIND, WEST WIND, published by the John Day Company in 1930. John Days publisher Richard Walsh took an immediate liking to Pearl and her work. This was to be the start of a long prosperous writing career in which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for THE GOOD EARTH and became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Pearl Buck divorced her husband in 1935 after falling in love with Walsh. The couple moved into an estate in Bucks County, Pennsylvania shortly after their marriage. Pearl and Richard lived at Green Hills Farm with their six adopted children. It was at this residence that she would write over 100 works before her death in 1973.

--- Pearl was born in West Virginia in 1892, while her parents were on furlough from their missionary activities in China. The family soon returned to China.

--- In 1900, they were forced to flee to Shanghai during the Boxer Rebellion, where Pearl eventually attended boarding school.

--- In 1914, Pearl received her B.A. from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia. She accepted an assistantship at the college and began to teach, but soon returned to China to take care of her ill mother.

--- In 1917, she was married in China to John Lossing Buck, an American agricultural specialist. She and her husband went to live in North China, moving later to Nanking where he taught agricultural theory and she taught English literature at the University of Nanking.

--- In 1926, she received an M.A. in English from Cornell University and returned to China.

--- Her first novel, EAST WIND, WEST WIND, was published in 1930, soon followed by the GOOD EARTH in 1931 which won her a Pulitzer Prize.

--- In 1934, the Bucks decided to take up permanent residence in the United States. After her divorce from John Lossing Buck, Pearl married Richard Walsh, president of the John Day publishing firm.

--- In 1938 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

--- On March 6, 1973, she died of lung cancer at her second home in Danby, Vermont. She was buried at Green Hills Farm, her Pennsylvania estate, which is now a National Historic Site and the International Headquarters of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation.

ARTICLE

Mainland China is still a mystifying country despite the proliferation of novels in recent years.  Oppressive customs, bloody revolutions and poverty-stricken peasants are still the most common images that flicker through our minds.  As a girl of fifteen, my only reference points for China were linked to geography lessons and my mother's theory on "starving children in China" as an inducement for me to "clean my plate."

That all changed abruptly in the fall of my junior year when my English Lit teacher handed out our first reading assignment --- THE GOOD EARTH written by Pearl S. Buck.  I groaned inwardly at the thought of spending the next three weeks in rice paddies and Marco Polo-esque tales, but I dove into the first chapter determined to get it over with.  By Chapter Two I'd forgotten it was an assignment.

This was the China that Buck knew firsthand.  The rural peasant people that she grew up with, lived and worked with for forty years, were brought to life in her gentle prose.  Smiling dark-eyed babies and toothless old men, rugged peasant farmers and stoic dispirited women.  Concubines and warlords and temples to the gods of earth.  They flowed from her memory to the page with such passion that I was swept into the story before I knew it.  I was appalled at the squalor of these ancient villages; dismayed by the wretched lives of the women.  Give birth in a washtub and go back out to hoe the fields?  Who could DO that?  The gulf between their culture and mine was mind-boggling and those images were indelibly etched on my young mind.

Although Pearl Buck had written earlier stories and essays about China --- even a novel entitled EAST WIND, WEST WIND --- it was THE GOOD EARTH that brought her the Pulitzer Prize and international attention.  This was followed by two more sagas that formed the trilogy of the Wang Lung family, SONS and A HOUSE DIVIDED, as well as other fiction and nonfiction novels.  In 1938, less than a decade after beginning her writing career, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

It isn't surprising that Buck can write with such visceral compassion and frankness.  Her parents were missionaries in rural China at the turn of the century.  She spoke Chinese before she spoke English.  Twice while living there, she was forced to flee her home because of violent revolutions.  An unhappy first marriage of convenience and a severely retarded daughter added to the experiences that had a profound affect on her writing.  Themes of marriage, family and survival flow prominently throughout her work.

In 1934 she returned to America where she became actively involved in civil rights and women's rights.  PAVILION OF WOMEN, written in 1946, is a remarkable example of her open criticism of Chinese traditions and the plight of women.  The unorthodox story of Madame Wu focuses the spotlight on male/female relationships, responsibility and love.  She also became a proponent for better understanding between people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.  DRAGON SEED and THE PROMISE deal with China in the midst of WWII and the fundamental prejudices that can lead to wars between neighbors and nations.

Pearl S. Buck created a colossal body of work --- over seventy books --- with unforgettable characters and vivid imagery.  If you weren't lucky enough to be assigned THE GOOD EARTH in school, pick it up and get acquainted with one of the great storytellers of our century.

--- Ann Bruns