Buck, Pearl S.

BUCK, PEARL S. (1892–1972). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for her portrait of Chinese peasant life in The Good Earth and the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938, Pearl Sydenstricker Buck exemplified one face of the American anticolonialist and anti-imperialist tradition. Having grown up in China as the daughter of American missionaries, she became a highly visible critic of the practice of missionary work in the 1930s. Working with her second husband, Richard J. Walsh—the editor of Asia magazine and president of the John Day publishing company—she helped left-wing writers on China such as Edgar Snow, Helen Foster Snow, Agnes Smedley, and Anna Louise Strong reach American audiences.

Through her articles and speeches during World War II, she became, as W. E. B. Du Bois noted, the leading American exponent of the view that the Allies must renounce colonialism and racism in order to attract support in Asia and among African Americans in the United States. She presciently believed that the American failure to break with colonialism during the war laid the basis for future wars, and she warned against the rise of U.S. imperialism in “American Imperialism in the Making.” She headed such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union’s Committee against Racial Discrimination during the war, the India League of America (which worked to support India’s independence from Britain), the Citizens’ Committee To End Chinese Exclusion, and the East and West Association (an early advocate of multicultural education). While Buck was not a socialist or a Marxist, and her writings exhibited an ambivalence about revolution, she was associated with more orthodox leftists, as well as a broader progressive spectrum, in these groups.

Buck’s early writings portrayed the subordination of Chinese women, but by the late 1930s she was also highly critical of formal and informal discrimination against women in the United States. While consistently critical of Stalinism, Buck was an early opponent of the Cold War and of the American military build-up in the late 1940s, warning of American tendencies toward fascism. She advocated recognition of the People’s Republic of China after 1949 and opposed U.S. policy in the Korean War as well. Using her unique public credibility as an interpreter of the views of Asian peoples for Americans, she wrote widely in these years on the theme that the United States was the most hated nation in the world because of its development of the atom bomb, its arrogance as a superpower, and the great gap between American ideals and reality, especially on racial issues.

After 1951 Buck’s explicitly political activity waned and her writings contained increasingly anti-Communist overtones. Nevertheless, she launched in the 1950s a crusade to focus attention on the problems of babies born to American GI fathers and Asian mothers, mounting a critique of American society and policy that linked the issues of racism, sexism, and militarism. She died of lung cancer in Danby, Vermont.

Buck, Pearl S., with Eslanda Goode Robeson. American Argument. New York: John Day, 1949.

Conn, Peter. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Lipscomb, Elizabeth, […], eds. The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Snow, Edgar. “Pearl Buck’s Worlds.” Nation, 13 November 1954.

Yoshihara, Mari. Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.