Pearl S. Buck

Profile / Biography

Pearl S. Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia in 1892.  When she was three months old, her parents moved to China to become missionaries in Zhenjiang, taking their infant with them.  Buck earned to read and write Chinese before learning English.

In 1910, Sydenstricker left China and returned to the United States, attending Randolph-Macon Women’s College, and graduating with her degree in 1914.  After earning her degree, she returned to China.

In 1921, Sydenstricker married John Lossing Buck in 1917 and began to teach English Literature in Nanjing at its University. In 1926, Buck again left China for the United States to earn her Master’s degree at Cornell Univeristy.

Buck began writing in 1930.  Her first novel was East Wind:West Wind and was followed the year after with The Good Earth, considered one of her greatest works. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for best novel in 1932.

In 1934 Buck left China for the last time, fleeing political tensions and obtaining a divorce from her husband.  She remarried in 1935 and continued to write, earning the Nobel Prize for Literature for her biographies of her parents, The Exile and The Fighting Angel.  The Prize was the first to a woman from the United States for literature.