Soon translated into more than thirty languages, The Good Earth made Buck one of the most popular American authors in the world. The Pearl Buck farmhouse, Bucks County, PA, 1935 It was her second novel The Good Earth, published in 1931, that brought her lasting fame. There, Pearl began to write stories and essays about the Chinese people for both Chinese and American magazines. From 1920 to 1933, the Bucks lived in the city of Nanking, where they both taught at a local university. In 1917, she married John Lossing Buck and moved to the rural Anhwei (Anhui) province. After early schooling in China, she attended Randolph-Macon College in Lynchburg, Virginia, then returned to China. When just three months old, she was taken to China by her missionary parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker. You have shown us the rise and fall of families, and the land as the foundation upon which families are built.' In response to critics who opposed her selection by the Nobel Committee, Buck explained populist nature of her writing in a lecture she delivered a few days later.īuck was born Jin Hillsboro, West Virginia. Buck, 'you have taught us by your works to see the individuals in that great mass of people. At the Nobel Prize banquet in Stockholm, Sweden in 1938, Stockholm Observatory director Bertil Lindblad told Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. The best selling book of the decade, however, told the story not of the American poor, but of a poor Chinese farmer. In 1941, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans showed Americans the respect and dignity of southern sharecroppers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. At the end of the decade, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath would give faces and names to the 'Okies' displaced by the Dust Bowl.

In the 1930s many American writers attempted to express in words the plight of the anonymous millions who suffered most during the Great Depression.

King Gustav awards Pearl Buck the Nobel Prize for Literature, Stockholm, Sweden.

The good earth novel