Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973)

Pearl Sydenstricker was the daughter of Southern Presbyterian missionaries. She spent much of her life in China, though she graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. From childhood she was bilingual in English and Chinese. She married an agricultural economist named John Lossing Buck in 1917, and together they lived in rural Anhwei province, an impoverished area. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Good Earth, and other stories set in China are based on what she learned while living there. In 1935, after divorcing John Buck, Pearl married publisher Richard Walsh. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature. She is buried at Green Hills Farm, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.