Pearl S. Buck

Born in West Virginia in June 1892, Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was carried to China at four months old by her missionary parents. She grew up in Zhenjiang, summered in a villa on Mount Lu, and decided during those childhood pilgrimages that she would write. After graduating from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia, she returned to China, married John Lossing Buck in 1914, and served as a Presbyterian missionary until her convictions shifted and she resigned amid the Fundamentalist-modernist controversy. The Good Earth, published in 1931, became the best-selling U.S. novel two years running and won her the Pulitzer in 1932; six years later she took the Nobel for her "rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and her memoir-biographies of her parents. She moved back to the United States in 1935, married publisher Richard J. Walsh, and spent the next decades writing prolifically and campaigning for women's rights, racial equality, and Asian adoption.