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Pearl S. Buck bio |
 The Face and Future of Youth Throughout the World |
| 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). |
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