Pearl S. Buck was an American writer and novelist lauded for her fictional and biographical work depicting life in rural China. Born Pearl Sydenstricker in West Virginia in 1892, she was in fact raised in Zhenjiang, China where her parents were Christian missionaries. She returned to the United States in 1910 to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia, where after earning her degree she briefly lectured in psychology before returning to China to teach English literature. Buck published fiction and nonfiction about life in rural China in publications like The Nation and Atlantic Monthly,  essentially becoming a literary liaison between China and the English-speaking world during these early years of her career. 
After an unsuccessful marriage to the agricultural economist John Lossing Buck, Pearl S. Buck became disillusioned with the idea of Christian ‘missions’ and began to openly critique the practice — Is there a Case for Foreign Missions? was published in 1932. She began to advocate for native Chinese populations in her writing, including her novels East Wind: West Wind (1930) and The Good Earth (1931), which attempted to bring the realities of the lives of Chinese peasants to readers in the west. The Good Earth won that year’s Pulitzer Prize, and in 1938 Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for her work. 
Buck returned to the United States and settled in Pennsylvania when the political climate in China became dangerously turbulent, where she continued to writer and would ultimately produce over forty novels and over twenty works of nonfiction. Pearl S. Buck passed away in 1973 of lung cancer, and although she remains best known for her literary depictions of rural China, her later works reflected a passion for social causes in the United States as well. Buck was active in anti-racist and anti-sex discrimination efforts, and was considered boldly progressive for her time.