Funtestiq!  Pictures

Pearl Buck, 1892-1973.  The daughter of Presbyterian missionary parents from West Virginia, Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker grew up in Zhenjiang, a small town on the Yangzi River in China.  Fluent in both English and Chinese, Pearl spent most of the first forty years of her life in the Eastern land, which became the inspiration for and the setting of her literary creations, of which the best known was The Good Earth, a story about a Chinese peasant couples' struggle for survival.  Her accomplishment was recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.  

A graduate of Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, Pearl married Cornell-trained agricultural economist John Lossing Buck in 1917, who joined her to work in China.  The union was not a happy one, however, and ended in divorce after eighteen years.  Their only daughter was born retarded, whose story Pearl Buck told in The Child Who Never Grew.  The welfare of handicapped and orphaned children became the other life-long interest of Pearl Buck, and, later in her life, with the more than $7,000,000 earnings from her writings,she funded the Pearl S. Buck Foundation devoted to the cause.