Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck is best known for her writing, but she was more than just the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize for literature.

Born in 1892 in West Virginia to missionary parents, Buck spent most of the first 40 years of her life in China. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia.

She published her first novel, “East Wind, West Wind,” in 1930, and her second novel, “The Good Earth,” the following year, earning her a Pulitzer. 

“I should like to say, too, that in my country it is important that this award has been given to a woman,” Buck said in her Nobel Banquet speech. “You who have … long recognized women in other fields, cannot perhaps wholly understand what it means in many countries that it is a woman who stands here at this moment.”

Buck moved back to the U.S. permanently in the mid-1930s and continued writing prolifically. She was involved in activism for civil rights and women’s rights. Buck wrote articles for the publications of the NAACP and the National Urban League and was a trustee at Howard University. She spoke out against the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and advocated for the repeal of Chinese exclusion laws.

Buck was the mother of several adopted children, as well as one biological child, and adoption was an issue of high importance to her. In 1949, she founded Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency. In 1964, she created a foundation to help children overseas with health, education and job training.

— Naomi Jagoda