Pearl S. Buck was a legend whose notoriety lives long after her death. The first American woman to win the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes, she used her humanity and literary talent to introduce Chinese culture to the West. By the time of her death at age 80, she had published more than 70 books. Because she grew up there, she understood and loved China—despite the fact that her adopted homeland banned her works for many decades. Her unique cultural grounding and powerful soul provided the perfect foundation for her acclaimed novel, The Good Earth, and the many works that followed.
A Missionary Falls in Love
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 16, 1892 in West Virginia while her parents were on leave from their missionary work in China. Shortly after her birth, the family returned to China, where she was educated in both Eastern and Western traditions. Her mother taught her American history; her father read her Bible verses. But every afternoon, Pearl learned to read and write Chinese, spending hours mastering Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist proverbs and principles. By the time she returned to the United States to attend college at Randolph-Macon Women's College in Virginia, she was not only steeped in Chinese culture but in love with it. Shortly after Pearl graduated, her mother's grave illness took Pearl back to China, where she met and married the first of her two husbands.
Culture Clash
Pearl and her family lived through some of the most tumultuous uprisings and political turmoil in Chinese history. Like her character Wang Lung in The Good Earth, Pearl was a survivor. The troubles she and the country experienced during her early adult life inspired her craft, beginning with the publication of essays and short stories in the "Nation" and "Atlantic Monthly" during the 1920s. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind was written the year before The Good Earth and established her reputation. However, it was The Good Earth, her passionate book about the rise and fall of a farmer named Wang Lung, that truly broke new ground. Part of a trilogy later published as House of Earth, Pearl's second novel was a runaway bestseller that made her both a household name and a pariah simultaneously. While the book met with instant success in the West, the critical response was mixed in the East. While many Eastern critics felt the book was a significant contribution to understanding Chinese rural life, others rejected it as one Westerner's view.
The Legacy She Left Behind
Throughout her life, Pearl S. Buck explored the complexities of the human condition. She sought to understand the ways innovation clashes with tradition, cultures inform one another and progress creates problems. Through her literary and biographical compassion, she achieved a rare mastery over her characters with her simple and sympathetic view of their lives. Pearl's tender empathy also spilled over into her own life decisions. She was a tireless philanthropist who translated her missionary impulse to a zeal for bettering the world. She fought for civil rights, women's rights and personal freedom. She pioneered foreign adoption in the United States and personally raised a dozen children. Her years of courageous philanthropy led to an entirely new community of Amerasian children adopted into the United States; today, Pearl S. Buck International, the author's foundation, continues to support thousands of underprivileged children in several Asian countries. The example Pearl set—by the woman she was, the life she led and the things she wrote—is a testament to cultural understanding, compassion and tolerance.
FAST FACTS ABOUT THE GOOD EARTH
Skyrocketing Popularity
Unanimously selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club literary experts—a group who had been selecting titles since 1926—The Good Earth was the first of 15 books written by Pearl S. Buck to be included in the club. After being chosen as a Book-of-the Month, letters started flooding into the publisher and sales skyrocketed, making The Good Earth the best-selling book of both 1931 and 1932.
Going Where No Book Had Gone Before
Many writers, including the poet Adrienne Rich, recognized when they first read The Good Earth that the scenes in which O-lan gives birth were unique to American fiction at the time. Women were rarely portrayed giving birth, and never in such a simple, natural and graphic way.
What Pearl's Dad Didn't Read
Despite the fact that The Good Earth was published several months before his health declined, Pearl Buck's father, Absalom, went to his deathbed without reading his daughter's famous work.
Advice for the Unborn Novelist
Despite myriad ways Pearl Buck's vision was shifted and forever changed by her youth in China, she felt it had also made her permanently uncomfortable with the English language and an expert in many things Americans didn't care to know. Shortly before the publication of A House Divided—the final book in the three-part Good Earth trilogy—Buck gave a lecture at Yale University titled "Advice for the Unborn Novelist." In it she suggested that writers were better off being born in their own country. She says, "Go out and be born among gypsies and thieves or among happy workaday people who live in the sun and do not think about their souls." (Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography by Peter Conn, p. 178)
A Woman of Mystery
During her first book tour for The Good Earth—directly after the book won the Pulitzer Prize—Pearl Buck was so secretive and determined to avoid the press that she considered wearing a disguise while in public. She was so remote in the eyes of journalists that many speculated she didn't actually exist! Though her seclusion wasn't a marketing ploy, it did serve to make her even more sought after by both journalists and adoring fans.
Hollywood Makes an Offer
Before its first year in print was over, The Good Earth had been translated into German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Chinese and garnered a then unheard-of $50,000 from MGM studios to be made into a movie. This was the largest sum Hollywood had ever paid for the rights to a book. The irony that she was becoming wealthy during the Depression was not lost on her.
The Cottage that Love Built
Writing The Good Earth was a lucrative endeavor. In the first 18 months after it was published, the novel earned its author well over $100,000—a huge sum for the time. Much of the money went to establish an endowment at her daughter Carol's institution that ensured her care for life. As a result, a special cottage was built on the grounds to house Carol and several girls her age.
O-lan Gets a Makeover
The MGM film adaptation of The Good Earth opened in January of 1937 to rapturous reviews from both critics and fans. Legendary producer Irving Thalberg's last project—he died before the movie was completed—the film carries his unmistakable stamp in its cinematography and bent towards romance. Though the picture is true to the novel in many ways, in order to give the beautiful Luise Rainer a juicy role, O-lan was transformed from a dowdy slave to a glamorous seductress who claims Wang Lung's erotic lust. The movie earned several Academy Award® nominations and Rainer won the best actress statue for her tender portrayal.
The Wang Lung in Pearl's Life
Like her characters in The Good Earth, Pearl Buck and her first husband John Lossing Buck lived in both the Anhwei province and Nanking. When he first arrived in China, Lossing—the son of a farmer himself—tried his hand at planting wheat and battling seasonal floods just like Wang Lung.
China One Last Time
In 1972, 80-year-old Pearl Buck was denied an entry visa into China—reportedly for having criticized Mao Zedong, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, by name in the 1950s and because she had invited an actress who had once been chosen over Mao's wife for a movie role to visit the United States. Buck passed away the following year. The ban the Chinese Communist Party had placed on her books in 1949 was officially lifted in 1994.
Get more resources on The Good Earth, an Oprah's Book Club selection.View the Complete Oprah's Book Club List.
Published 09/15/2004
