Pearl of the Orient

When she was a little girl, playing in the countryside around her missionary parents’ home in China, Pearl Buck used to come across the scattered body parts of babies abandoned for animals to devour. She would bury them, and tell no one.

When she was a little girl, playing in the countryside around her missionary parents’ home in China, Pearl Buck used to come across the scattered body parts of babies abandoned for animals to devour. She would bury them, and tell no one.

Born in 1892, she buried painful experiences all her life, telling no one, apparently forgetting — but they came out in her stories and novels. Her most famous novel, The Good Earth, has never been out of print and has sold millions of copies in many countries. She was, in the mid-20th century, one of the most prolific and famous authors in the world, a controversial celebrity, blacklisted as pro-Communist in the US and as anti-Communist in China, a campaigner for racial equality, birth control, and an end to discrimination against women and the disabled.