About The Author
PEARL BUCK (1892-1973)
Though American by birth, Pearl S.Buck spent most of her childhood and youth in China. Out of her life and experiences there she wrote many books about the wisdom and patience of the Chinese peasants and about their suffering in war. She won the Nobel prize in 1938.
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries to China, she grew up outside the city of Chinkiang. Pearl attended boarding school in Shanghai and Randolph-Macon Woman's College at Lynchburg, Virginia.
In 1917 she married John Lossing Buck, an American agriculturalist in China. They had one daughter, whose story she told in The Child Who Never Grew.
Buck's first article, "In China, Too," appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1923. Her first book was East Wind: West Wind, followed a year later by The Good Earth, her most famous novel. Buck wrote more than 85 books. Some of the most successful were A House Divided (1935), The Patriot (1939), and Dragon Seed (1942).
Divorced in 1935, Buck married her publisher, Richard J. Walsh. She established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation of Philadelphia, which has aided in the adoption of Amerasian children. Buck died on March 6,1973, at her home in Danby, Vermont.
--Courtesy of Compton's Learning Company
Back
