Meet the Author
Pearl S. Buck
American · 1892–1973 · Novelist and humanitarian
Portrait: Unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
An American writer raised in China whose novel of a peasant farmer brought Chinese village life to millions of Western readers.
1 StoryBites Edition1 Big Book
Why read Pearl S. Buck?
Buck grew up in China as the daughter of missionaries and wrote about ordinary Chinese people with a closeness few Western novelists had managed. The Good Earth follows one farmer from poverty to wealth. Read her for a vivid picture of rural China in the early twentieth century.
A life in six dates
- 1892Born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, and taken to China as an infant
- 1914Graduates from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College
- 1931Publishes The Good Earth
- 1932Wins the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth
- 1938Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature
- 1949Founds Welcome House, an adoption agency
- 1973Dies in Danby, Vermont
Themes across the work
The StoryBites Editions
Context that actually matters
A missionary childhoodBuck spoke Chinese before English and grew up among the farmers she later wrote about.
China in upheavalHer novels are set in the years of famine, revolution, and the fall of the old imperial order.
The Nobel PrizeShe was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.