Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro,
West Virginia. Her parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, were
Southern Presbyterian missionaries, stationed in China. When she was three
months old, she was taken back to China, where she spent most of the first
forty years of her life. The Sydenstrickers lived in Chinkiang
(Zhenjiang), in Kiangsu (Jiangsu) province, then a small city lying at the
junction of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal. Pearl's father spent
months away from home, itinerating in the Chinese countryside in search of
Christian converts; Pearl's mother ministered to Chinese women in a small
dispensary she established.
From childhood, Pearl spoke both English and Chinese. She was taught
principally by her mother and by a Chinese tutor, Mr. Kung. In 1900,
during the Boxer Uprising, Caroline and the children evacuated to
Shanghai, where they spent several anxious months waiting for word of
Absalom's fate. Later that year, the family returned to the US for another
home leave.
In 1910, Pearl enrolled in Randolph-Macon Woman's College, in
Lynchburg, Virginia, from which she graduated in 1914. Although she had
intended to remain in the US, she returned to China shortly after
graduation when she received word that her mother was gravely ill. In
1915, she met a young Cornell graduate, an agricultural economist named
John Lossing Buck. They married in 1917, and immediately moved to
Nanhsuchou (Nanxuzhou) in rural Anhwei (Anhui) province. In this
impoverished community, Pearl Buck gathered the material that she would
later use in The Good Earth and other stories of China.
The Bucks' first child, Carol, was born in 1921; a victim of PKU, she
proved to be profoundly retarded. Furthermore, because of a uterine tumor
discovered during the delivery, Pearl underwent a hysterectomy. In 1925,
she and Lossing adopted a baby girl, Janice. The Buck marriage was unhappy
almost from the beginning, but would last for eighteen years.
From 1920 to 1933, Pearl and Lossing 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.
Pearl had begun to publish stories and essays in the 1920s, in
magazines such as Nation, The Chinese Recorder, Asia, and Atlantic
Monthly. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published by the John
Day Company in 1930. John Day's publisher, Richard Walsh, would eventually
become Pearl's second husband, in 1935, after both received divorces.
In 1931, John Day published Pearl's second novel, The Good Earth. This
became the best-selling book of both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize
and the Howells Medal in 1935, and would be adapted as a major MGM film in
1937. Other novels and books of non-fiction quickly followed. In 1938,
less than a decade after her first book had appeared, Pearl won the Nobel
Prize in literature, the first American woman to do so. By the time of her
death in 1973, Pearl would publish over seventy books: novels, collections
of stories, biography and autobiography, poetry, drama, children's
literature, and translations from the Chinese.
In 1934, because of conditions in China, and also to be closer to
Richard Walsh and her daughter Carol, whom she had placed in an
institution in New Jersey, Pearl moved permanently to the US. She bought
an old farmhouse, Green Hills Farm, in Bucks County, PA. She and Richard
adopted six more children over the following years. Green Hills Farm is
now on the Registry of Historic Buildings; fifteen thousand people visit
each year.
From the day of her move to the US, Pearl was active in American civil
rights and women's rights activities. She published essays in both Crisis,
the journal of the NAACP, and Opportunity, the magazine of the Urban
League; she was a trustee of Howard University for twenty years, beginning
in the early 1940s. In 1942, Pearl and Richard founded the East and West
Association, dedicated to cultural exchange and understanding between Asia
and the West. In 1949, outraged that existing adoption services considered
Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable, Pearl established Welcome
House, the first international, inter-racial adoption agency; in the
nearly five decades of its work, Welcome House has assisted in the
placement of over five thousand children. In 1964, to provide support for
Amerasian children who were not eligible for adoption, Pearl also
established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which provides sponsorship
funding for thousands of children in half-a-dozen Asian countries.
Pearl Buck died in March, 1973, just two months before her eighty-first
birthday. She is buried at Green Hills
Farm.
|