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Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892 to Caroline and Absalom Sydenstricker, the fourth of their seven children. Only three of the children would survive to adulthood. Pearl's birthplace was the home of her grandmother in West Virginia. Her parents were Presbyterian missionaries who were briefly back in the United States from China. They returned to Zhenjiang, China when Pearl was three months old and she grew up near the Yangtse River. Her first language was Chinese, and her mother and teacher taught her English as she grew older.
Life in China was not always easy. Her family once had to flee their home away from the rebel forces during the Boxer rebellion.
Until the age of fifteen Pearl was schooled by her mother and a Chinese Confucian scholar called Mr. Kung. From 1907 to 1909 Pearl went to Boarding school in Shanghai. At the age of 18, Pearl returned to the United States and earned a degree in philosophy from Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. It was a big adjustment and for a while she considered the American girls too frivolous, but soon learned to appreciate their freedom and spontaneity. She was an excellent student and participated in student politics. She remained for a semester teaching psychology, but then returned to China to assist her sick mother.
Pearl married an agricultural missionary named John Lossing Buck on May 13, 1917 in China, but the marriage was unhappy from early on. Pearl had a daughter named Carol in 1921. Sadly, the child was born with a condition known as PKU. PKU is a rare condition that can result in mental retardation. Because no treatments were known at that time, Carol was brought back to the states and placed in full time care in New Jersey after the age of four. Pearl underwent a hysterectomy because of a tumor found in her uterus, so Carol was their only natural child. They adopted a girl named Janice in 1925.
The Bucks were University professors in Nanking in 1923 when Pearl's first work was published. It was a non-fiction article for Atlantic Magazine, entitled "In China Too". In 1925 she studied at Cornell University and while there wrote "A Chinese Woman Speaks", a piece which would be the basis for "East Wind, West Wind", Buck's first novel. The novel was published by Richard Walsh of the John Company in 1930. Walsh and Buck continued on a long publishing partnership thereafter.
Buck held a deep love for China and its people, which she considered her home. "The Good Earth" is her best known work, and it was published in 1931. It remained on the best seller list for 21 months. It won the Pulitzer Prize as "the best novel published during the year by an American author." The novel was translated into thirty languages, and into movies and a Broadway Play.
Walsh and Buck fell in love and Buck divorced her husband in 1935. Richard and Pearl married and the new couple moved to an estate in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. They adopted six children.
During the second World War, Buck lectured on Chinese-American relations using her inside perspectives to make strong points. Interracial love relationships were common subjects in her work. Upon learning that Asian and mixed race children were considered unadoptable, Buck opened "Welcome House", the first international, interracial adoption agency.
Pearl Buck became deeply involved in social issues, including Civil Rights and women's rights activities in the United States. She wrote extensively on the subjects, and she and her husband both lectured and wrote about the strained relationship between China and the United States.
Pearl Buck wrote over eighty works. She won the Nobel Prize in 1938. She died on March 6, 1973 in Danby, Vermont and is buried at Green Farms Hill.
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