09/18/2025
Pearl S. Buck: A Life Between Worlds
On this day in 1892, Pearl S. Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia. The daughter of Christian missionaries, she was taken to China at just three months old, where she grew up immersed in Chinese language and culture. “I spoke Chinese first, and more easily,” she later said. “I did not consider myself a white person in those days.”
Pearl’s childhood was shaped by both worlds—her mornings spent learning from her mother, and her afternoons with her beloved Chinese nurse, listening to stories, women’s gossip, and playing with local friends.
As an adult, Buck married an agricultural missionary and lived in northern China and later in Nanking, where she taught English literature. In 1920, she gave birth to her daughter Carol, who had a severe developmental disability. Her husband withdrew, unable to cope, leaving Pearl isolated and burdened with responsibility. Torn between love, despair, and frustration, she admitted: “Sometimes I can scarcely bear to look at other children and see what she might have become.”
Her life unraveled further during the Nanking Incident of 1927, when their home was destroyed and the manuscript of her first novel lost to looters. Forced to flee with nothing but the clothes they wore, Pearl and her children ended up in Shanghai, living in cramped conditions, while her marriage deteriorated. Her husband controlled her earnings and refused to leave China, even though Pearl knew Carol’s only hope of long-term care was in the United States.
Out of necessity, Pearl returned to writing—not out of passion but as a way to provide for her daughter. After many rejections, she finally found an agent, David Lloyd, who stood by her for 30 years. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind (1930), was eventually accepted, but it was her second book, The Good Earth (1931), that changed her life. Written in just three months, it became the best-selling book of 1931 and 1932, selling nearly 2 million copies.
With its success, Buck earned enough to secure Carol’s care. She put $40,000—a vast sum at the time—toward her daughter’s schooling. In the years that followed, she became one of the most celebrated authors of her time, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.
Pearl S. Buck’s story is not only of literary triumph, but of resilience: a woman who turned personal pain, cultural displacement, and loss into words that bridged continents and changed the way the West saw China.
