Pearl Buck First American Woman to Win Nobel Prize for Literature
The noted author Pearl Buck on this day became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Buck’s most noted novel was The Good Earth (1931), which won the Pulitzer Prize in Literature in 1932.
Buck was the daughter of American missionaries and she spent the years before 1934 in China, which was the setting for The Good Earth. Because of her 1962 novel Satan Never Sleeps, describing communist tyranny in China, she was never again allowed to return to the country that meant so much to her.
In addition to being an award-winning novelist, she was a political activist on behalf of civil rights. During World War II, she was a leader of efforts to improve race relations in the U.S., and worked closely with the ACLU and its Committee Against Racial Discrimination (CARD).
In 1949, outraged by the fact that American adoption agencies did not regard Chinese children as suitable for adoption, along with the successful novelist James A. Michener she founded Welcome House, the first international adoption agency committed to interracial adoptions.
Read Pearl Buck’s famous novel: The Good Earth (1931)
Visit the Pearl S. Buck International web site
Read Pearl Buck’s FBI file: http://vault.fbi.gov/Pearl%20Buck
Watch an interview with Pearl Buck: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIMED93CAkE
Read the UN’s 2008 “International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Race Discrimination” here