A Biography and Life Work of Pearl S. Buck, a Chinese-Born American Writer

The person in this research paper is Pearl S. Buck. She was a famous writer on books about her and what is going on around the world. She lived most of her life in China, and some in the United States.

Pearl S. Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She spent her youth in China, in Chin kiang on the Yangtze River. She learned to speak Chinese before she could speak English. Her parents were missionaries. Buck’s father, Absalom Sydenstricker, was a very smart man who spent years translating the Bible from Greek to Chinese. Her mother, Caroline Stulting, had traveled widely in her youth and loved literature. Buck’s life in China wasnt very good. When she was only a child, her family was forced to flee from the rebel forces of the Boxer Rebellion.1

After being taught by her mother and a Chinese tutor, who was a Confucian scholar, Buck was sent to a boarding school in Shanghai at the age of fifteen. She also worked for the Door of Hope, a shelter for Chinese slave girls. Buck continued her education in the United States at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia, and studied psychology there. After graduating in 1914 she returned to China as a teacher for the Presbyterian Board of Missions. Her mother was very ill and Buck had to spend the next two years taking care of her. She married Dr. John Lossing Buck, an agricultural expert, who loved his work. When her mother became better, they moved into a village in the North China.2

Buck worked as a teacher and interpreter for her husband and traveled through the countryside. During this period China took steps toward liberal reform, also through the May 4th Movement of 1917 to 1921.

In the 1920s the Bucks moved to Nan king, where she taught English and American literature at the university. In 1924 she returned to the United States to seek medical care for he 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. 3

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 titled ‘A Chinese Woman Speaks’ in the Asia Magazine. Her breakthrough novel, The Good Earth appeared in 1931. The novel’s style, a combination of biblical prose and the Chinese narrative saga, increased the dignity of its characters. The book gained wide audience, and was made into a motion picture. 4

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 experience, 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.5

Buck and Walsh were active in humanitarian causes through the East and West Association, which were 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. 6

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. She coined the word “Amerasian” and raised millions of dollars for the adoption and fostering of Amerasian children often abandoned by their American fathers stationed in the Far East. Her own family included nine adopted children as well as her biological daughters. The Child Who Never Grew 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. Irving Thalberg had wanted to produce the novel since the 1931 publication. Thalberg employed many Chinese as extras and authentic background shots were made in China. Luise Rainer won an Academy Award for best actress. Buck did not first complain her small royalty, until years later, when MGM ignored her plea for a substantial donation to help Amerasian children.

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, Hillsboro, West Virginia and the Lipscomb Library of Randolph-Macon Women’s College, Lynchburg, Virginia.7

“I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels… If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born, myself a human being.” (Buck, Pearl pg. 34)

During her spanning forty years, Buck published eighty works: novels, plays, short story collections, poems, children’s books, and biographies. She wrote five novel under the name John Sedges and translated Lo Guangzhong’s The Water Margin / Men of the Marshes, which appeared in 1933 under the title All Men Are Brothers. The book depicts adventures of outlaws and was banned by Quing rulers. Command in the Morning concerned the efforts of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb and the ethics of dropping it on Japan. The Chinese Novel was largely an explanation of her own writing style.

8From 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 inadaptable, 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. 9

She also wrote The Good Earth, a dramatic tale of China in the 1920s that received a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1932 and has remained popular, and Dragon Seed. She wrote several novels under the pseudonym John Sedges, and she published two volumes of autobiography, My Several Worlds and A Bridge for Passing. Her last works include The Kennedy Women and China As I See It.

She became a prominent advocate of many humanitarian causes. She was a founder of the East and West Association, dedicated to improving understanding between Asian and America. Her experiences as the mother of a retarded child led her to work extensively on behalf of the mentally handicapped and to publish the moving and influential book, The Child Who Never Grew. The plight of Amerasian children, rejected by two worlds, aroused her sympathy as well, and in 1964 she established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to improve their lives.10

Pearl S. Buck became one of most famous women writes and was accepting into the Hall of Fame for Women. Her books are still around and are being copied for more readers to enjoy.

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