Buck, Pearl S. (1892-1973)
Author and humanitarian activist Pearl S. Buck almost single-handedly created the prism through which an entire generation of Americans formed its opinion about China and its people. Her work and personality first came to the attention of a wide audience in 1931, with the publication of her signature novel The Good Earth, based on her experiences growing up in China with a missionary family during the convulsive period from the Boxer Rebellion to the civil wars of the 1920s and 1930s. She wrote more than seventy other books—many of which were best-sellers and Book-of-the-Month Club selections—and hundreds of pieces in many genres, including short stories, plays, poetry, essays, and children's literature, making her one of the century's most popular writers. As a contributing writer to Asia magazine (later Asia and the Americas), published by her second husband, Richard Walsh, she brought a precocious "Third-World" consciousness to Americans by advocating an end to colonialism while advancing the causes of the peasantry, especially women.
In 1938, Buck became the first of only two American women to win the Nobel Prize for literature, though her books have fallen out of favor with critics and academicians and she is rarely anthologized today or studied in college literature courses.
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