Pearl S. Buck Pearl S. Buck Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973; also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu; ) was an American writer and novelist. As the daughter of missionaries, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, China. Her novel "The Good Earth" was the best-selling fiction book in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces". She was the first
The Good Earth the time of the 1911 Revolution. Some scholars have seen "The Good Earth" as creating sympathy for China in the oncoming war with Japan. "If China had not captured the American imagination," said one "it might just have been possible to work out a more satisfactory Far Eastern policy," but such works as "The Good Earth", "infused with an understandable compassion for the suffering Chinese, did little to inform Americans about their limited options in Asia." The diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber, however, although he agrees that Americans grew enamored of heroic Chinese portrayed by writers such as Buck, concluded that