Pearl S. Buck

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Pearl S. Buck
Pearl S. Buck
Born	June 26, 1892 Hillsboro, West Virginia, United States
Died	March 6, 1973 Danby, Vermont, United States

Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, most familiarly known as Pearl S. Buck (birth name Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker; Chinese: 赛珍珠; pinyin: Sài Zhēnzhū) (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973), was a prolific American writer and Nobel Prize winner.

Contents 1 Life 2 Home 3 Humanitarian efforts 4 Selected bibliography 4.1 Novels 4.2 Biographies 4.3 Autobiographies 4.4 Non-fiction 5 References 6 See also 7 External links

[edit] Life

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia to Caroline (Stulting; 1857-1921) and Absalom Sydenstricker (1852-1931), a Southern Presbyterian missionary. The family was sent to Zhenjiang, China in 1892 when Pearl was 3 months old. She was raised in California and learned the Chinese language and customs from a teacher named Mr. Kung. She was taught English as a second language by her mother and tutor. She was encouraged to write things at an early age.

In 1910, she left for America to attend Randolph-Macon Woman's College [1], where she would earn her degree in 1914. She then returned to China, and married an agricultural economist, John Lossing Buck, on May 13, 1917. In 1921, she and John had a daughter, Carol, who was afflicted with phenylketonuria. The small family then moved to Nanjing, where Pearl taught English literature at the University of Nanking. In 1925, the Bucks adopted Janice (later surnamed Walsh). In 1926, she left China and returned to the United States for a short time in order to earn her Master of Arts degree from Cornell University.

Buck began her writing career in 1930 with her first publication of East Wind: West Wind. In 1931, she wrote her most famous novel, The Good Earth (considered to be one of the best of her many works). The story of the farmer Wang Lung's life won her the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932. Her career continued to flourish; she won the William Dean Howells Medal in 1935.

The Bucks were forced to leave China in 1934 due to political tensions. When they returned to the United States, Pearl and John divorced. She then married Richard J. Walsh, president of the John Day Publishing Company, on June 11, 1935, and with him, adopted nine other children. In 1938, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to her for her work to that point, including the biographies of her parents, The Exile, and Fighting Angel.

Pearl S. Buck wrote over 100 works of literature, her best-known being The Good Earth. The Good Earth chronicled the fictional life of the farmer Wang Lung against the backdrop of 20^th century turmoil and revolution in China. It traces the rise of Wang Lung from the abject poverty of his early days to his final years by which he had accumulated great wealth and power. The novel portrays the complexities of marriage, parenthood, joy, pain, and human frailty. Buck stresses in the novel the value of fertile land, hard work, thrift, and responsibility. The novel has a very circular feel to it, recreating the ebb and flow of life, the change of seasons, and the cycles of age and family. Buck’s writing is unique in the way it blends the technical language of the King James Bible with the simplicity and directness of the old Chinese narrative sagas.

[edit] Home

Buck wrote about her experiences in China from her home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In 1935, she bought a sixty-acre homestead she called Green Hills Farm and moved into a hundred year-old farmhouse on the property with her second husband, Richard Walsh, and their family of eight children.

Green Hills Farm is where Buck spent thirty-eight years of her life, raising her family, writing, pursuing humanitarian interests, and gardening. She completed many works while living in Pennsylvania, such as This Proud Heart (1938), The Patriot (1939), Today and Forever (1941), and The Child Who Never Grew (1950).

[edit] Humanitarian efforts

Pearl Buck was an extremely passionate activist for human rights. In 1949, outraged that existing adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable, Pearl established Welcome House, Inc., the first international, interracial 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 Asian-American 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. When establishing the Opportunity House Foundation to support child sponsorship programs in Asia, Pearl S. Buck said "The purpose of the foundation is to publicize and eliminate injustices and prejudices suffered by children, who, because of their birth, are not permitted to enjoy the educational, social, economic and civil privileges normally accorded to children."[2]

Eventually, the organizations she founded, Welcome House, Inc. and Opportunity House (her name for the sponsorship programs) merged and incorporated the house in which she penned many of her books, to form Pearl S. Buck International. The Pearl S. Buck House in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, now a registered National Historic Landmark,[3] educates the public about a woman’s contribution to society with an intact collection of early 20th century artifacts drawn from her life in China as well as her time spent in the United States.[4]

While the historic site works to preserve and display artifacts from her profoundly multicultural life, many of Buck's life experiences are also described in her novels, short stories, fiction, and children's stories. Through them she sought to prove to her readers that universality of mankind can exist if man accepts it. She dealt with many topics including women's rights, emotions (in general), Asian cultures, immigration, adoption, and conflicts that many people go through in life.

Pearl S. Buck died March 6, 1973 in Danby, Vermont and was interred in Green Hills Farm in Perkasie.

[edit] Selected bibliography

[edit] Novels

• East Wind:West Wind (1930)
• The Good Earth (1931)
• Sons (1933)
• A House Divided (1935)
• This Proud Heart (1938)
• The Big Wave (1938)
• Dragon Seed (1942)
• Pavilion of Women (1946)
• Peony (1948)
• God's Men (1951)
• Come, My Beloved (1953)
• Imperial Woman (1956)
• China Sky (1956)
• Letter from Peking (1967)
• The Living Reed (1963)
• The Time is Noon (1966)
• Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (1967)
• The Three Daughters of Madame Liang (1969)

Note: The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided were later released together in 1935 as The House of Earth trilogy.

[edit] Biographies

• The Exile (1936)
• Fighting Angel (1936)

[edit] Autobiographies

• My Several Worlds (1954)
• A Bridge For Passing (1962)

[edit] Non-fiction

• China as I See It (1970)
• The Story Bible (1971)
• Pearl S. Buck's Oriental Cookbook (1972)

[edit] References

• Peter J. Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
• Elizabeth Johnston Lipscomb, Frances E. Webb Peter J. Conn, eds., The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a Centennial Symposium, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, March 26-28, 1992 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994)
• Liao Kang, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge across the Pacific (Westport, CT, London: Greenwood Press, 1997)
• Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)

[edit] See also

• 19th Century Protestant Missions in China

[edit] External links

• Pearl S. Buck International Website
  
• University of Pennsylvania website dedicated to Pearl S. Buck
  
• National Trust for Historic Preservation on the Pearl S. Buck House Restoration