Her daughter was disabled. Her marriage was collapsing. Her manuscript was destroyed. She had no money and no hope—so she wrote a novel that changed everything.
Her name was Pearl S. Buck, and she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—but first, she had to survive.
Pearl was born in 1892 in West Virginia, but she only spent three months there before her missionary parents took her to China. She grew up in Zhenjiang, a city on the Yangtze River, where she learned to speak Chinese before English.
“I spoke Chinese first, and more easily,” she later said. “I did not consider myself a white person in those days.”
While her mother tutored her in English and Western subjects each morning, Pearl spent her afternoons with her beloved Chinese nurse, Wang Amah, who told her stories, taught her Chinese customs, and took her to visit local families. Pearl listened to women gossip, absorbed their stories, learned to see the world through Chinese eyes.
She hid her blond hair under a hat, played with Chinese children, attended their parties. She was neither fully American nor fully Chinese—she existed in between, belonging everywhere and nowhere at once.
This bicultural identity would eventually make her one of the most important writers of the 20th century. But first, it would make her life extraordinarily complicated.
In 1917, Pearl married John Lossing Buck, an American agricultural missionary. They settled in rural northern China, then moved to Nanking, where Pearl taught English literature at the university.
In 1920, she gave birth to a daughter, Carol.
Something was wrong. Carol didn’t develop like other children. She couldn’t speak properly. She had violent tantrums, screaming for hours. She couldn’t learn basic tasks. Today, we know Carol had phenylketonuria (PKU), a metabolic disorder that causes severe developmental disabilities if untreated. But in 1920, no one understood what was happening.
Pearl’s husband couldn’t cope. He withdrew emotionally, leaving Pearl to manage Carol alone while continuing her teaching work.
Pearl’s feelings toward her daughter were painfully complicated. Sometimes she devoted herself completely to Carol, desperately hoping the condition would improve. Other times, she felt crushing frustration and shame.
“Sometimes I can scarcely bear to look at other children and see what she might have become,” she confessed.
Her husband controlled their finances completely, forcing Pearl to sign over her tiny teaching salary and then beg him for an allowance. He refused to consider returning to America, where Carol might receive better care.
Pearl realized with sickening clarity: she would likely end up solely responsible for Carol’s care, and she had no means of providing it.
Then, in 1927, everything collapsed.
The Nanking Incident—a violent uprising targeting foreigners during China’s civil war—forced Pearl and her family to flee their home with nothing but the clothes they wore. Soldiers ransacked their house.
Inside, in Pearl’s attic workspace, was the only copy of the novel she had just finished—years of work, her first real literary accomplishment.
The manuscript was destroyed.
The Red Cross evacuated them to Japan, where they lived as refugees for seven months before relocating to a run-down rental house in Shanghai, shared with two other families. Her husband returned to Nanking for work, leaving Pearl alone with the children in cramped, depressing conditions.
Her marriage was disintegrating. Her daughter needed expensive, long-term care. She had no money and no manuscript.
Pearl was 35 years old, living in poverty, responsible for a disabled child, trapped in a controlling marriage, and her only completed novel had been destroyed by war.
Most people would have given up.
Pearl started writing again—not because she loved it, but because she had no other option. Writing was her only possible path to financial independence, her only hope of securing Carol’s future.
She found an old trade magazine in a Shanghai bookstore that listed three literary agents. She wrote to all three.
Two rejected her immediately, saying there was no American market for stories about China.
The third, David Lloyd, agreed to represent her. He would remain her agent for 30 years.
In 1929, Pearl took Carol back to America to find appropriate care. Touring institutions for disabled children broke her heart. Most were warehouses where children were hidden away, neglected, forgotten.
She finally found the Vineland Training School in New Jersey—a place that seemed humane, where Carol might be safe and cared for.
Leaving Carol there was, Pearl said, the hardest thing she ever did in her life.
To afford the care, she borrowed money from a member of the Mission Board.
At the same time, her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was finally accepted for publication by John Day Company—after 25 rejections. It was the last publisher on her agent’s list. One more rejection and the manuscript would have been withdrawn permanently.
The publisher, Richard Walsh, saw something special in Pearl’s writing. (He would later become her lover, then her second husband after she divorced John Buck.)
Pearl returned to China and immediately began writing her second novel. She wrote in a frenzy, driven by financial desperation and creative urgency.
Three months later, The Good Earth was finished.
The novel told the story of Wang Lung, a Chinese farmer, and his wife O-Lan—ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Pearl wrote about Chinese people as fully human, complex, dignified, worthy of empathy.
In 1930s America, this was revolutionary.
When The Good Earth was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, Pearl received a check for $4,000—enough to pay for several years of Carol’s care. She was stunned. For the first time in her life, she had financial security.
The book became a phenomenon. It sold nearly 2 million copies in its first year, remaining the bestselling novel of both 1931 and 1932.
Pearl earned more than $100,000 in eighteen months—an astronomical sum during the Great Depression. She immediately put $40,000 toward Carol’s long-term care.
In 1938, Pearl S. Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Nobel Committee praised her “rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.”
But Pearl’s achievement went deeper than beautiful prose. She had humanized Chinese people to American readers at a time when racism and xenophobia were rampant. She challenged Americans to see across cultural boundaries, to recognize humanity in people they’d been taught to dismiss.
She spent the rest of her life advocating for civil rights, women’s rights, and disability rights. She adopted seven children of mixed race—children who, like her, existed between worlds. She wrote over 70 books. She founded Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency in America.
Pearl S. Buck died in 1973 at age 80.
Carol outlived her mother, dying in 1992 at age 72, having spent most of her life at Vineland.
Pearl’s story is one of survival transformed into art. She didn’t write The Good Earth because she felt inspired—she wrote it because she was desperate, because her daughter needed care, because she had no other way out.
And that desperation produced one of the most important American novels of the 20th century.
Sometimes our greatest work comes not from comfort, but from necessity. Not from privilege, but from the determination to survive.
Pearl S. Buck proved that mothers will do anything for their children—including change the world
