The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck

List Price: $12.95
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0743272935
Publisher: Washington Square Press

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892 in the West Virginia home of her grandmother. She was born the fourth of seven children to Caroline and Absalom, two Presbyterian missionaries, who were home from China. The family quickly returned to their home in Chinkiang, China three months after Pearls birth. Pearl grew up among the Chinese peasants in a small farming community. Her first language was Chinese, she grew up with the customs and traditions of the Chinese. As she grew her mother and her teacher taught her English.

In 1910, Pearl returned to the United States to earn a degree at Randolph-Macon Womens College in Lynchburg, Virginia. She studied philosophy and was very active in the student government. She was elected class president and was a Phi Beta Kappa. After her graduation in 1914, she stayed at Randolph-Macon to teach psychology. After one semester she returned to China to assist her ill mother.

Pearl married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural missionary, in China on May 13, 1917. The couple led a very unhappy life together. In 1921, Pearl gave birth to a daughter, Carol, who was mentally disabled with a disease called PKU. Pearl decided to return to the States and place her in a full-time care facility in Vineland, New Jersey. Because of a tumor found in Pearl's uterus during delivery, she underwent a hysterectomy.

From 1920-1933, the Bucks lived in Nanking on the campus of the university where they both taught. Pearl published her first work in 1923, a nonfiction article for Atlantic magazine titled "In China too." In 1925, while studying at Cornell University, she wrote an article titled "A Chinese Woman Speaks" which would later be the impetus for her first novel East Wind, West Wind, published by the John Day Company in 1930. John Days publisher Richard Walsh took an immediate liking to Pearl and her work. This was to be the start of a long prosperous writing career in which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth and became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Pearl Buck divorced her husband in 1935 after falling in love with Walsh. The couple moved into an estate in Bucks County, Pennsylvania shortly after their marriage. Pearl and Richard lived at Green Hills Farm with their six adopted children. It was at this residence that she would write over 100 works before her death in 1973.

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