Her work has remained a sentimental favorite of millions of readers around the world. Contemporary Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston has credited Buck with acknowledging Asian voices, especially those of women, for the first time in Western literature. Biographer Peter Conn declared in his 1996 study
Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography that "never before or since has one writer so personally shaped the imaginative terms in which America addresses a foreign culture. For two generations of Americans, Buck invented China." He quoted historian James Thomson's belief that Buck was "the most influential Westerner to write about China since thirteenth-century Marco Polo." Living in the United States during the second half of her life,Buck was prominent in many progressive social movements, lending her support to causes on behalf of disarmament, immigrants, women, and racial minorities. Her outspoken activism, especially during and after World War II, earned her an FBI dossier and the ire of McCarthyists in the 1950s.
Pearl Buck was born Pearl Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia, on June 26, 1892, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries Absalom and Carie (Stulting) Sydenstricker, who were then on leave from their post in China, to which they returned when Pearl was three months old.
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