Authors: Pearl S. Buck

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The publication of The Good Earth in 1931 made Pearl S. Buck world-famous as a popular novelist. With that book, she achieved fame, not only as a novelist but also as the foremost interpreter of China to Westerners. She, John, and their two daughters returned to the United States for a year’s leave. On the return trip to China, she requested and received a year’s separation from John. During that year, she traveled extensively through Asia. In 1934, she left for the United States with Janice. Pearl divorced John Buck on June 10, 1935; the next day, she married Richard J. Walsh, the president of John Day, her publishing company. They settled on a farm in Pennsylvania and later adopted nine children. Richard died in 1960 after a lengthy illness.

Honorary degrees were awarded to Buck by several institutions, including Harvard and Yale Universities. She was also one of the first women to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Good Earth won many awards for its author, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1935. She was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1936. Her crowning award was the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she received in 1938 for her portrayal of the Chinese people in her novels.

The Good Earth was the first novel of a trilogy, The House of Earth, which includes Sons and A House Divided. The trilogy presents the history of a Chinese family through several generations, and it has been compared to the Rougon-Macquart series of novels by Émile Zola. Similarities are especially strong between Buck’s The Good Earth and Zola’s La Terre (1887; The Soil, 1888, and also as Earth, 1954), running much deeper than the titles.

The Good Earth was an exceptionally popular novel. With its American sales approximating a million copies, and translations made into twenty or more other languages, the novel topped the best-seller lists in the United States for more than two years. Despite its vast popularity, or perhaps partly because of it, and because her books were concerned with a culture alien to the United States, critics and scholars have been slow to grant Buck’s work a place in literary history. Critical appraisals of The Good Earth and Buck’s later novels have indicated that the greatest merit of the books lies in the truthfulness with which China and its people are portrayed.

Following The Good Earth, which is a point of departure in any discussion of Buck, came other novels which had more modest success, such books as The Young Revolutionist, portraying the Chinese Communist movement, and The Mother, which relates the tribulations of a Chinese peasant woman. During the 1930’s, Buck also turned to writing books other than novels; The First Wife, and Other Stories was her first volume of published short fiction. Like a later volume, Today and Forever, it had relatively little appeal to the public, which seemed to have quickly categorized Buck as a novelist.

In addition to her other work, there appeared two volumes of biography, The Exile and Fighting Angel, portraits of the author’s missionary parents. These two books offer a suggestion as to why Buck broke away from missionary work. They show her belief that the Christianity of the missions failed to arouse Chinese sympathy for Christianity or the people who represented it. Perhaps that belief also played a large part in Buck’s continued efforts to help improve understanding between the Chinese and Western peoples. In 1941, she founded the East and West Association, serving as its president for many years. Her work to improve understanding continued through such volumes as Dragon Seed, The Promise, Pavilion of Women, Peony, Kinfolk, The Hidden Flower, and Imperial Woman.

An autobiographical volume, My Several Worlds, relates the author’s experiences as a person, a writer, and a humanitarian. Because of the criticism Buck received contending that she could write only about China, she wrote five novels about the United States from 1945 to 1953 under the pseudonym John Sedges. The first of these novels, The Townsman, was highly acclaimed. Also worthy of mention in Buck’s amazing volume of writings is All Men Are Brothers, a translation of a Chinese classic, Shui hu chuan. She also wrote and published a number of books for children.

Pearl Buck considered herself a writer in the Chinese tradition of fiction, a tradition that stresses entertainment as its primary purpose. Such was her declaration in her Nobel lecture, The Chinese Novel. She also said that she had to write, especially novels, and that she could not be truly happy unless she was writing, either to entertain or to further her humanitarian and liberal beliefs in religion and politics. In 1964, she started the Pearl Buck Foundation with a contribution of one million dollars. The foundation helped more than two thousand Asian children fathered and abandoned by American service members.

In failing health, Buck continued to write until her death. Her novel All Under Heaven was published less than a week before she died in Vermont on March 6, 1973. The manuscript of her final novel, The Eternal Wonder, was finished not long before her death but vanished. It was only resurfaced in December 2012 in Texas, and the following year, the bildungsroman was finally published.