Southern Presbyterian missionaries Absalom
and Caroline Sydenstricker gave birth to Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker on
born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia, USA. Their mission
was in China. The fourth of seven children, Pearl was born near the end
of a vacation for her parents in the United States. One of only three
children that would survive to adulthood, she was taken to China by her
parents at the age of three months, where she lived for most of the
first forty years of her life.
The Sydenstrickers mission was headquartered in Chinkiang, a small city
lying at the junction of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal, though
Absolem spent the majority of every year preaching and prosletizing in
rural China, seeking converts; Pearl's mother, Caroline, provided
nursing and medical help to Chinese women in a little clinic and
apothecary that the family had established.
Pearl grew up fluent in both English and Chinese, she was instructed by
both her mother and a Chinese tutor. During the Boxer Uprising in 1900,
Caroline Sydenstricker and the surviving children had to evacuate to
Shanghai, and they spent several months waiting for word of Absalom
Sydenstricker's fate. When he finally returned to Shanghai later that
year, they then returned to the US for a furlough.
Pearl Sydenstricker enrolled in Randolph-Macon Woman's College, in
Lynchburg, Virginia in 1910, and she graduated in 1914. She returned to
China shortly after graduation when she received word that her mother
was gravely ill. In 1915, she met John Lossing Buck, a young Cornell
graduate, who was an agricultural economist. They married in 1917, and
moved to Nanhsuchou in rural Anhwei province. It was in this destitute
community that Pearl Buck amassed the material that would later be used
in writing The Good Earth.
Pearl and Lossing’s first child, Carol, was born in 1921, but was found
to be mentally retarded. Because of a uterine tumor discovered during
the delivery, Pearl underwent an emergency hysterectomy. However, she
and Lossing adopted a baby girl, Janice in 1925. The Buck marriage
lasted for eighteen years, but appeared unhappy almost from the
beginning.From 1920 to 1933, Pearl and Lossing lived in Nanking on
the campus of Nanking University, where both had teaching positions. In
1921, Pearl's mother died and shortly afterwards her father moved in
with the Bucks. The tragedies and dislocations which Pearl suffered in
the 1920s reached a climax in March, 1927, in the violence known as the
"Nanking Incident." In a confused battle involving elements of Chiang
Kai-shek's Nationalist troops, Communist forces, and assorted warlords,
several Westerners were murdered. The Bucks spent a terrified day in
hiding, after which they were rescued by American gunboats. After a trip
downriver to Shanghai, the Buck family sailed to Unzen, Japan, where
they spent the following year. They then moved back to Nanking, though
conditions remained dangerously unsettled.
It was during the 1920s, that Pearl began to publish stories and
essays in magazines such as Nation, The Chinese Recorder, Asia, and
Atlantic Monthly. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published
in 1930, by the John Day Company. Day's publisher, Richard Walsh,
eventually became Pearl's second husband, in 1935, after they both
received divorces. |
John Day published Pearl's second novel,
The Good Earth in 1931. Not only the best-selling book of both 1931 and
1932, it won Pearl the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal in 1935, and
would be adapted as a major MGM film in 1937. Other novels and books of
non-fiction quickly followed. In 1938, less than a decade after her
first book had appeared, Pearl won the Nobel Prize in literature, the
first American woman to do so. By the time of her death in 1973, Pearl
would publish over seventy books: novels, collections of stories,
biography and autobiography, poetry, drama, children's literature, and
translations from the Chinese.
In 1934, because of conditions in China, and also to be closer to
Richard Walsh and her daughter Carol, whom she had placed in an
institution in New Jersey, Pearl moved permanently to the US. She bought
an old farmhouse, Green Hills Farm, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, today
a National Historic Landmark. She and Richard adopted six more children
over the following years.
Immediately upon reaching the US, Pearl became active in American civil
rights and women's rights activities. She published essays in both
Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, and Opportunity, the magazine of the
Urban League; she was a trustee of Howard University for twenty years,
beginning in the early 1940s. In 1942, Pearl and Richard founded the
East and West Association, dedicated to cultural exchange and
understanding between Asia and the West. In 1949, outraged that existing
adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable,
Pearl established Welcome House, the first international, inter-racial
adoption agency; in the nearly five decades of its work, Welcome House
has assisted in the placement of over six thousand children.
In June of 1959, Pearl Buck gave the first of two keynote addresses
during the second plenary session of Rotary’s International Convention
in New York City. (The second was given by Dr. Werner von Braun.) In
1964, to provide support for Amerasian 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. In 1991, the Pearl S. Buck Foundation and Welcome House
combined to form the organization known today as Pearl S. Buck
International.
Buck passed away just months before her 81st birthday, in March 1973.
Dr. Peter Conn reported that she is buried at Green Hills Farm.
Sources include the July 1959 issue of The Rotarian, the 1959 Convention
Proceedings and Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography by Dr. Peter Conn
(Cambridge, 1996).
Doug Rudman
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