"The Good Earth" is a novel published in 1931 and written by Pearl S. Buck. The novel was an instant success and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the next year in 1932. It was the bestselling novel in the United States in both 1931 and 1932 and went a long way toward helping […]
Pearl S. Buck
Pearl S. Buck (born as Pearl Sydenstricker) was and American novelist. Born in Hillside West Virginia in 1892, Buck was the daughter of American missionaries and grew up in China. As an adult, she taught in China from 1917 to 1934. After leaving she began a very active writing career in the States.
Buck published more than 85 books (works, not only of fiction but of history and journalism) many of which brought the tumultuous country of China into American homes sympathetically for the first time. Buck's simple, direct style of writing and concern for the fundamental values of human life were derived from her study of the Chinese novel. She received a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her book "The Good Earth" and a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938. Some of her other works include: "Dragon Seed" (1942), "The Kennedy Women" (1970) and "China as I see it" (1970).
Because of her love for the country of her birth, The U.S as well as her love for China, Buck also published novels about the American West under the male pseudonym of John Sedges.
Buck devoted her life to humanitarian causes and her novels reflect this by exploring the problems caused by social injustice and human prejudice. Her writing sought to increase the west's understanding of the east.
In 1917, Pearl married her first husband, John Lossing Buck who was an agricultural economist missionary in China. The two lived in China and Pearl shortly gave birth to a daughter named Carol who suffered from phenylketonuria, a metabolic disease. In 1935, Buck divorced John Lossing Buck and remarried to a man named Richard Walsh.
Pearl S Buck died of lung cancer at the age of 80 in 1973. She is buried in Perkasie, Pennsylvania underneath a tombstone bearing Chinese characters that represent her maiden name which she designed.
