Pearl Buck
From Philosopedia
Buck, Pearl S. (26 June 1892 - 6 March 1973)
Buck (nee Pearl Comfort Sydenstrucker) was born in West Virginia to parents who were missionaries in China for the Southern Presbyterian Church. At three months, she moved with them to China, where she lived for the next 40 years, except to attend college. She was fourth of seven children, but only one of three to survive to adulthood. She attended a women's college in Virginia for four years, and in 1917 married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural economist living in China. They lived in a rural province, which became the inspiration for The Good Earth, her 1931 bestseller, which won the Pulitzer.
The couple had a baby in 1921 which was born with PKU, and was profoundly retarded. Pearl had a hysterectomy when a tumor was found during the delivery. They adopted a child and taught at Nanking University. Pearl began writing for The Nation, Atlantic Monthly and other publications.
Her first novel was East Wind, West Wind. She moved back to the United States permanently in 1934, settling in Green Hills Farm, Pennsylvania. Her publisher, Richard Walsh, became her second husband in 1935, and they adopted six children.
Despite writing 70 books, Pearl found time to devote to civil rights and women's rights. She was routinely published in the NAACP's magazine, Crisis, and by the Urban League. She was a 20-year trustee of Howard University, and founded East and West Association, to improve relations between the United States and Asia. She also founded the first international, inter-racial adoption agency, Welcome House, in 1949, placing more than 5,000 children in homes. In 1964, she started the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to help Amerasian children
Buck, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, wrote in 1949,
- I feel no need of any 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 or angels.
In What America Means to Me (1947), she wrote,
- It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.
Five of her novels were written under the pseudonym, John Sedges.
