When Carol was young, Pearl wrote to a friend: She did, many years later, in her book The Child Who Never Grew. It was a long time before she, who was never at a loss for words, was able to express anything about the subject. Pearl was devastated, and experienced much guilt. Tragically, the girl had a genetic condition called phenylketonuria, characterized by profoundly impaired intellectual and physical function. That same year, she had her first child, Caroline (usually called Carol) Grace Buck. Pearl taught English literature at a small private college in Nanking. In 1920, they returned to the area near which Pearl grew up. It was this region that inspired the backdrop for The Good Earth and Sons, two of her best-known books. The couple moved to Suzhou in Anhui Province. There she met and married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural economist missionary, in 1917.

She intended to stay in the states, but when her mother became seriously ill, she returned to China in 1914. to study at Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, VA. Pearl S.Buck, circa 1932 (p hoto courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) She loved to read from an early age, and was especially fond of the work of Charles Dickens. She was also tutored in classical Chinese by a scholar. Pearl was raised bilingual, learning English from her parents and the local Chinese dialect from the neighborhood children. shortly before Pearl was born, then, when she was just five months old returned to China, settling in Zhenjiang, a town near Nanking. Her parents had spent much of their years of marriage, from about 1880 on, in China. She was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.īorn Pearl Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia, she was the daughter of Southern Presbyterian missionaries. Buck (J– March 6, 1973), was an American author of fiction and nonfiction, as well as a humanitarian and human rights advocate.

Pearl buck's the good earth