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Pearl S. Buck

Biographical Information

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892 in the Hillsboro, WV, home of her grandmother. Her parents, Presbyterian missionaries, were home on leave from their service in China. Three months later, the couple returned to China, taking with them their infant daughter. The child Pearl grew up surrounded by the customs and traditions of the Chinese peasants. In fact, Chinese, not English, was her first language. She returned to the United States in 1910 to attend Randolph-Macon College, where she was named Phi Beta Kappa and elected class president. After her graduation in 1914, she remained at Randolph-Macon to teach psychology, but she left after only one semester to return to China to tend her sick mother. In 1917, Pearl married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural missionary to China, but the couple's unhappy marriage ended in 1935. Pearl gave birth to her only natural child in 1921, a baby girl who was found to be profoundly retarded because of a disease called PKU. Carol would be the cause of her mother's later support for the care and treatment of retarded children. Buck's first novel, East Wind, West Wind was published in 1930, while she was still living in China. She followed that book with the Chronicles of the Family Wang, The Good Earth (1931), Sons (1932), and A House Divided (1935). It was The Good Earth that first brought Pearl Buck to the attention of the world, winning her the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howell Medal. After her divorce in 1935 from John Buck, Pearl married her publisher, Richard Walsh, and the couple moved to Green Hills Farm in Bucks County, PA. From here, Pearl Buck would write more than 100 more books before her death in 1973. Her work brought numerous awards and recognitions, including the honor of becoming the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1938).

Pearl Buck was more than just an author, even a great one, though. In her lifetime, she was recognized as a noted humanitarian, particularly concerned with the rights of women and children. She founded Welcome House, Inc., an international agency set up to promote the adoption of Asian-American children, now part of the Pearl S. Buck International Foundation, an organization "committed to making the world a more humane place for its children by promoting the appreciation and understanding of other cultures through education, adoption, and support." She used her work to bring attention to the inferior status of women in traditional China. Because of her experiences with her daughter Carol, whose story is told in The Child Who Never Grew, helped inspire Pearl Buck as an activist for retarded persons. She and her second husband Richard also adopted nine children.

Before her death, Pearl S. Buck donated her manuscripts to the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation, the organization that cares for and administers her family's Hillsboro home. After her death and brief legal battles with other foundations that made claim to the priceless manuscripts, the Birthplace Foundation took possession of the manuscripts in 1974. Currently, they are housed in the Annie Merner Pfeiffer Library at West Virginia Wesleyan College, where they are available to scholars with permission of the Birthplace
Foundation.

Critical Responses

Commenting once to an interviewer about the response to her work by critics, Pearl Buck said, "One pays the price for being prolific. Heaven knows the literary Establishment can't forgive me for it, nor for that fact that my books sell." Certainly no one can argue the fact that Pearl Buck was a prolific writer (she produced over 70 major works), nor with the fact that her books sold (and continue to sell) well. But after the 1930s, a decade that saw the publication of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good Earth and Buck's biographies of her parents, The Exile and Fighting Angel (cited for particular excellence by the Nobel Committee), critics tended to regard Buck's work with disdain. Contemporary Authors summarizes the post-1938 critical response to Pearl Buck this way: "Suspicious of her tremendously high output and annoyed by her all-too-frequent lapses into didacticism and sentimentality, post-1938 critics regarded her for the most part as a prime example of a 'too much, too often' writer."

One goal Pearl Buck had as a writer was to teach the Western world about Chinese culture, to help Western readers to understand and appreciate the Chinese culture she so loved. Critics, however, were divided as to whether or not Buck succeeded in her goal. Critic Phyllis Bentley remarked:

An attempt is made to present China from within, as the Chinese see it. . . In the same way, Mrs. Buck aims to present the Chinese customs as familiar, natural, and correct, because so would her characters regard them. [These customs] are all copiously illustrated, but always presented, as it were, unselfconsciously, as part of the natural process of living; never by the slightest word or turn of phrase does Mrs. Buck call attention to the difference of these customs from our own.

Other critics were much less impressed with Buck's depictions of China. Dody Weston Thompson, writing in American Winners of the Nobel Literary Prize, says:

Moving in a vivid world of Chinese custom, in a spiritual landscape seen always understandingly through Chinese eyes, Pearl Buck's major characters of that period were nevertheless so "universal," so recognizable anywhere, as to seem only incidentally "Chinese." One gets no real sense in these novels of an ethos that was in actuality profoundly different from the West. Nowhere, for example, is it shown what constitutes a Taoist, Buddhist, or Confucian, their distinctions and similarities, or their considerable distances from Western thought …


Even The Good Earth, perhaps the most critically acclaimed of Buck's works, drew critical fire for its depictions of Chinese life. Writing in the New Republic, Younghill Kang commented "Since Mrs. Buck does not understand the meaning of the Confucian separation of man's kingdom from that of woman, she is like someone trying to write a story of the European Middle Ages without understanding the rudiments of chivalric standards and the institution of Christianity. None of her major descriptions is correct expect in minor details. . .Its implied comparison between Western and Eastern ways is unjust to the later."

Despite the negative criticism, though, Pearl Buck undeniably had an impact on twentieth century American literature. She was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Fiction, a feat duplicated only by Toni Morrison almost 60 years later. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the William Dean Howells Medal for the Most Distinguished Work of American Fiction 1930-35. Her work won numerous other prizes as well and Buck herself was the recipient of numerous honorary degrees.

Works Published

Fiction

  • East Wind, West Wind
  • The Good Earth
  • Sons
  • The Young Revolutionist
  • All Men Are Brothers
  • The First Wife and Other Stories
  • The Mother
  • A House Divided
  • House of Earth
  • This Proud Heart
  • The Patriot
  • Stories for Little Children
  • Other Gods: An American Legend
  • Today and Forever: Stories of China
  • Dragon Seed
  • China Sky
  • The Chinese Children Next Door
  • The Water-Buffalo Children
  • Twenty-seven Stories
  • The Promise
  • The Story of Dragon Seed
  • The Dragon Fish
  • The Townsman: A "John Sedges" Novel
  • Portrait of a Marriage
  • China Flight
  • Yu Lan: Flying Boy of China
  • Pavilion of Women
  • Far and Near: Stories of Japan, China, and America
  • The Angry Wife
  • Peony
  • The Big Wave
  • The Long Love
  • Kinfolk
  • One Bright Day
  • God's Men
  • The Hidden Flower
  • Bright Procession
  • Come, My Beloved
  • Voices in the House
  • Johnny Jack and His Beginnings
  • The Beech Tree
  • Imperial Woman
  • Letter from Peking
  • Christmas Miniature
  • American Triptych: Three "John Sedges" Novels
  • Command the Morning
  • The Christmas Ghost
  • Fourteen Stories
  • Satan Never Sleeps
  • Hearts Come Home and Other Stories
  • The Living Reed
  • Stories of China
  • Escape at Midnight and Other Stories
  • Fairy Tales of the Orient
  • Death in the Castle
  • The Big Fight
  • The Little Fox in the Middle
  • The Water-Buffalo Children and the Dragon Fish
  • The Time is Noon
  • Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
  • The Beech Tree and Johnny Jack and His Beginnings
  • The New Year
  • The Three Daughters of Madame Liang
  • The Good Deed and Other Stories of Asia, Past and Present
  • Mandala
  • The Chinese Story Teller
  • Once Upon a Christmas
  • The Goddess Abides
  • A Gift for the Children
  • Mrs. Starling's Problem
  • All Under Heaven
  • Words of Love (poetry)
  • The Rainbow
  • East and West: Stories
  • Secrets of the Heart: Stories
  • The Lovers and Other Stories
  • Mrs. Stoner and the Sea and Other Works
  • The Woman Who Was Changed and Other Stories
  • The Old Demon
  • Little Red

NonFiction

  • East and West and the Novel: Sources of the Early Chinese Novel
  • Is There a Case for Foreign Missions? (pamphlet)
  • The Exile
  • Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul
  • The Chinese Novel
  • Of Men and Women
  • When the Fun Begins
  • American Unity and Asia
  • Pearl Buck Speaks for Democracy
  • What America Means to Me
  • The Spirit and The Flesh
  • China in Black and White: An Album of Woodcuts
  • Tell the People: Mass Education in China
  • Talk About Russia with Masha Scott
  • How It Happens: Talk About the German People
  • American Argument
  • The Child Who Never Grew
  • The Man Who Changed China: The Story of Sun Yat-sen
  • My Several Worlds: A Personal Record
  • Friend to Friend: A Candid Exchange Between Pearl S. Buck and Carlos P. Romulo
  • The Delights of Learning
  • A Bridge for Passing
  • Welcome Child
  • The Joy of Children
  • Children for Adoption
  • My Mother's House
  • The People of Japan
  • For Spacious Skies: Journal in Dialogue
  • To My Daughters, With Love
  • The Kennedy Women: A Personal Appraisal
  • China As I See It
  • The Story Bible
  • Pearl Buck's America
  • Pearl S. Buck's Oriental Cookbook
  • China Past and Present
  • A Community Success Story: The Founding of the Pearl Buck Center
  • Pearl Buck's Book of Christmas

Plays

  • Flight into China
  • Sun Yat-Sen: A Play
  • The First Wife
  • A Desert Incident
  • Christine
  • The Guide

Selected Bibliography

Conn, Peter. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge University Press; 1196.

Liao, Kang. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge Across the Pacific. Greenwood Press; 1997.

Lipscomb, Elizabeth and Frances E. Webb, eds. The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a Centennial Symposium, Randolph Macon Women's College, March 26-28, 1982. Greenwood Press, 1994.

Shaffer, Robert. Pearl S. Buck and the Politics of Food. Proteus: A Journal of Ideas. Spring 2000, 17:1. 9-14.

Author Website

Pearl S. Buck