Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck was an American novelist and humanitarian best known for writing about life in China. Born in West Virginia in 1892, she was raised in China by missionary parents and became fluent in both English and Chinese. Her upbringing gave her an unusually close understanding of Chinese society, particularly rural life, family relationships and the cultural tensions created by encounters between China and the West.

Her best-known novel, The Good Earth, follows a farming family through poverty, prosperity and social change in early twentieth-century China. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became the first volume of the House of Earth trilogy. Buck wrote numerous other novels, biographies and works of non-fiction, and in 1938 she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. She also campaigned for civil rights, international understanding and the welfare of mixed-race and Asian children.