Pearl was bom in Virginia, the United States in 1892 and her parents were Christian missionaries. When Buck was three months old, her parents took her with them on a mission to China. Buck would spend most of her forty years in China.

From childhood, Pearl spoke both Chinese and English. She learned to speak Chinese before she learn to speak English. She was most of the time taught by her mother and by a Chinese tutor. She grew up playing with Chinese children who referred to her as a “foreign devil”. She never developed the superiority toward the Chinese common among the families of western Christian missionaries. Rather, Buck, having grown up in China, was better equipped to recognize some of the absurdities of her parent’s profession, as is evident in her portrayal of Western missionaries in The Good Earth.

Buck returned to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Women’s College where she did well academically and even achieved some measure of popularity. However, the country of her birth was largely unfamiliar to her, so she felt like a foreigner. After her graduation, she returned to China to take of her sick mother. Her first and only biological child, Carol, was bom a few years after she got married. Due to a uterine tumor, Buck had to undergo an operation called hysterectomy. Soon afterwards, she found out that her daughter was severely retarded. Almost at the same time, her mother died after her long illness. Despite these misfortunes placed on her life, she refused to be defeated.

The Good Earth, her second and best-known book was published in 1931. The novel quickly gained an international reputation. It sold 1,800,000 copies in its first year. It has been translates into more than thirty languages and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1932. It was made into a Broadway play in the same year and a Hollywood movie in 1937. It was cited in the decision to award her the Noble Prize for Literature, “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces"a year later.

Pearl Buck s works after 1938 are too many to mention. Her novels have continued to deal with the confrontation of East and West, her interest spreading to such countries as India and Korea. Her novelist’s interest in the interplay of East and West has also led to some activity in political journalism.

Yet, in spite of the unparalleled influence of the nearly fifty books she wrote about China, she also devoted herself to humanitarian causes. She coined the word “Amerasian” and raised millions of dollars for the adoption and fostering of Amerasian children, often abandoned by their American parents stationed in the Far East. With her husband, she founded an adoption agency for children of mixed Asian and American parentage. These children were often outcasts in Asian countries because of their mixed blood and because they were often the illegitimate off-spring of American servicemen. Buck’s own family included nine adopted children as well as her biological daughter. The Child Who Never Grew told a personal story of her own daughter, whose mental development stopped at the age of four.

Buck also took an active interest in issues as diverse as the lives of immigrants in New York City and the Indian independence movement. In addition to these various causes, she fought constantly on behalf of the rights of women. She was a staunch supporter of free speech and civil liberties.

Buck spent all her life trying to help people in the United States understand Chinese culture. She would write over a hundred works of literature, including novels, short stories, fiction, and children’s stories. Many of her life experiences are related to or in her books. She dealt with many topics including women, emotions, Asians, immigration, adoption, and conflicts that many people go through in life. She wanted to prove to her readers that universality of mankind can exist if they accept it.

In other words in her lifetime she succeeded in opening Americans’ minds about social, racial, and gender injustice in her writing and her acts. She had a profound influence on the way Americans think about China and about international relations in general.