Buck, Pearl S. 

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973). Luce Index™ rank 95. Pearl S. Buck was a product of America’s great Protestant missionary impulse that began during the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century. Her father was a Presbyterian missionary who felt called to labor in China. Pearl was born in 1892 in West Virginia and spent much of her childhood in China as the offspring of this “great adventure of American foreign missions.”

In 1938, Pearl S. Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China” and for her biographical masterpieces. Her most famous work, the novel The Good Earth, was the Western world’s first accurate representation of life in China.

Despite her missionary background, Buck later became disillusioned with the missionary practices she witnessed in China, criticizing them as “incompetent, intolerant, and ineffective.” She advocated for a more humanitarian approach focused on improving the educational, agricultural, medical, and sanitary conditions of the mission field rather than just counting new church members.