Pearl Comfort (Sydenstricker) Buck (1892 - 1973)

Born 26 Jun 1892 in Hillsboro, Pocahontas, West Virginia, United States

Ancestors

Wife of John Lossing Buck — married 30 May 1917 (to 1935) in Dutchess, New York

Died 6 Mar 1973 at age 80 in Danby, Rutland, Vermont, United States

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Biography

Pearl S. (Sydenstricker) Buck is Notable.

Pearl Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. As the daughter of missionaries, Buck spent most of her life in China, beginning at 5 months old until 1934. From ages 4-18, the family lived in Zhenjiang.

In 1911, Pearl left China to attend Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. She graduated in 1914 as an elected undergraduate member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society and as a member of the Kappa Delta sorority when it had its Theta chapter at Randolph-Macon. Not long after her graduation, she returned to China as a teacher for the Presbyterian Board of Missions.

On 13 May 1917, she married John Lossing Buck, a U.S. agricultural expert living in China. They had a daughter Carol and a son John who died young. She taught at the University of Nanking.

Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the U.S. in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces."

In 1935 she divorced John Buck and married Richard J. Walsh, her publisher. After her return to the United States in 1935, she continued her prolific writing career, and became a prominent advocate of the rights of women and minority groups, and wrote widely on Asian cultures.

She was also active in humanitarian relief work and co-founded the first international, interracial adoption agency in the US, to find homes for children fathered by American servicemen born to Chinese mothers who could not raise them.

Pearl S. Buck died of lung cancer on March 6, 1973, in Danby, Vermont, and was interred in Green Hills Farm in Perkasie, Pennsylvania. She designed her own tombstone. The grave marker is inscribed with Chinese characters representing the name Pearl Sydenstricker.

Sources

• Wikipedia:Pearl_S._Buck

• Find A Grave: Memorial #144

• Peter J. Conn. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge England ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ISBN 0521560802

• Hilary Spurling, Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China (London: Profile, 2010) ISBN 9781861978288

• Nora B. Stirling, Pearl Buck, a Woman in Conflict (Piscataway, NJ: New Century Publishers, 1983)

• Elizabeth Johnston Lipscomb, Frances E. Webb and Peter J. Conn, eds., The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a Centennial Symposium, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, March 26–28, 1992. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Contributions in Women's Studies, 1994. ISBN 0313291527

• Liao Kang. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge across the Pacific. (Westport, CT, London: Greenwood, Contributions to the Study of World Literature 77, 1997). ISBN 0-313-30146-8.

• Xi Lian. The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907-1932. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). ISBN 027101606X

• Mari Yoshihara. Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). ISBN 019514533X

• Karen J. Leong. The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). ISBN 0520244222

• Theodore F. Harris ((in consultation with Pearl S. Buck), Pearl S. Buck: a Biography (John Day, June 1969. ISBN 978-0-381-98113-6 )

• Theodore F. Harris ((in consultation with Pearl S. Buck), Pearl S. Buck; a biography. Volume two: Her philosophy as expressed in her letters (John Day, January 1971. ASIN B002BAA2PU )

• Wacker, Grant. “Pearl S. Buck and the Waning of the Missionary Impulse.” Church History 72, no. 4 (2003): 852–74. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4146375.