This is a companion piece to the Presbyterian News Article What's in a Name: Introducing Pearl 2.0.
First launched in the fall of 2015 with approximately 2,000 digital objects, Pearl Digital Collections has grown immensely in the decade since its creation. Since then, PHS staff have worked to add over 30,000 digital objects in a variety of formats: photographs, books, newspapers, historical documents, audio, video, and even websites. In 2015, the majority of those first 2,000 items in Pearl were photographs. Now, the range of materials from our archives that are freely accessible to the public stretches much farther.
Because the site has experienced such exponential growth, PHS staff began in February 2025 to redesign the site as a whole to give it a cleaner, more accessible and modern look. And what better way to celebrate this next chapter for our digital repository than to spend time getting to know its eponym: Nobel Prize-winning author and prominent Presbyterian, Pearl S. Buck.
Pearl S. Buck was the daughter of Southern Presbyterian missionaries to China, and grew up there surrounded by her parents’ faith, Chinese culture, and a passion for putting her thoughts down in words. In 1932, Buck’s first novel, The Good Earth, a historical fiction which told the story of a Chinese peasant farming couple as they lived through the fluctuating social and political landscape of early 20th-century China, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1938, she became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, “for the notable works which pave the way to a human sympathy passing over widely separated racial boundaries and for the studies of human ideals which are a great and living art of portraiture.”[1]
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892-March 6, 1973) was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She was not there for long—at just four months old, she was carted across the sea by her Presbyterian missionary parents, who had only returned to the U.S. for Pearl’s birth. Despite this short residency there, this first home of hers is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and houses the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Museum, which celebrates the influence that West Virginia had on Pearl. Pearl spent her youth gaining an education, writing down her feelings, and adopting her parents’ Presbyterian faith and values. Her home environment was one that stressed equality—her parents, Caroline and Absalom, forbade the use of the word heathen, and Pearl’s first language was Chinese. In 1911, she returned stateside to pursue a college education, but after receiving her degree she headed back to China, where she married missionary John Lossing Buck in 1917. Three years later, the two settled in Nanking, where they both had teaching jobs, and where, a decade later, they would be forced to take refuge as the Nanking Incident— the capture of Nanking by the National Revolutionary Army— raged through the city.
Though Pearl spent much of her youth and young adulthood writing, it wasn’t until she lived through the Nanking Massacre of 1927 that she began to write with true intent—to turn it into a vocation. Several missionaries had been murdered; the city was in shambles; Chinese soldiers marched the streets and burned buildings owned by Westerners. Pearl and her family survived the incident thanks to various Chinese neighbors and friends, who hid them and helped them to escape to Japan. Pearl returned to Nanking with a fresh determination: to make a living from her words and to take care of her children financially, particularly her daughter, Carol, who’d been born in 1920 with a genetic disorder called Phenylketonuria (PKU). At the age of nine, Carol was enrolled at Vineland Training School in New Jersey, where she lived until her death in 1992 at the age of 72.
Pearl finished the manuscript of The Good Earth in just three months, which would become her first published novel in 1931. She’d spent each morning writing in her attic apartment at Nanking University. Today, her former residence on campus is now the Pearl S. Buck Memorial House. The book was an instant worldwide best seller and earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. Many other novels would follow, as well as a memoir, biographies of her parents, children’s books, articles, and more.
In 1934, Pearl left her beloved China to return to the U.S. She divorced her first husband and remarried in the summer of 1935. She and her second husband purchased a house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which is now a National Historic Landmark and the headquarters of Pearl S. Buck International. The two quickly set about filling their home with adopted children: two sons in 1936, followed by another son and daughter in 1937. The next year, Pearl was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Following the Communist Revolution in 1949, Buck was repeatedly refused all attempts to return to China. Her writings, particularly The Good Earth trilogy, were banned in China at this time, too. Also in 1949, Buck founded Welcome House—the first permanent foster home for mixed-race children in the U.S., which then grew to become the first international, interracial adoption agency. Welcome House was originally located in a 16-room Pennsylvania farmhouse, right next door to Buck’s own home. The program matched more than 7,000 children and families. Author James Michener was on the Board of Directors.
Throughout it all, Pearl continued to write prolifically. At the time of her death—of lung cancer in March 1973—she left 25 manuscripts unfinished. Renowned and remembered for her dedication to bridging the gap between cultural misunderstandings and assumptions, Pearl S. Buck infused her books with emphases on human rights, women’s rights, the human connection to the earth, and the dignity and worth of the individual—no matter their race or ethnicity, no matter the country they lived in.
Pearl Digital Collections shares this in common with its namesake, too: it is a bridge between the past and the present, between the PHS archives and you. We hope you have fun browsing the new Pearl site!
Further Resources
Browse the Foreign Missions digital collection in Pearl
Watch a video of the 1938 Nobel Prize award ceremony for Mrs. Pearl S. Buck
Read the full transcript of Pearl S. Buck’s Nobel Prize lecture
[1] Presentation Speech by Per Hallström Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, on December 10, 1938. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1938/ceremony-speech/.
[2] A Chinese Fan of Pearl S. Buck Returns the Favor, NPR All Things Considered, published April 7, 2010, https://www.npr.org/2010/04/07/125682489/a-chinese-fan-of-pearl-s-buck-returns-the-favor.
[3] Mini-Documentary: Meet Pearl S. Buck, Open Road Media, YouTube, published August 20, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IbNj7zGP7I
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