
Walsh and continued writing prolifically. After returning to the United States in 1935, she married the publisher Richard J. Her views became controversial during the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, leading to her resignation. From 1914 to 1932, after marrying John Lossing Buck, she served as a Presbyterian missionary, but she came to doubt the need for foreign missions.

She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, then returned to China. She and her parents spent their summers in a villa in Kuling, Mountain Lu, Jiujiang, and it was during this annual pilgrimage that the young girl decided to become a writer. As the daughter of missionaries and later as a missionary herself, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, with her parents, and in Nanjing, with her first husband. īuck was born in West Virginia, but in October 1892, her parents took their 4-month-old baby to China.

In 1938, 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 "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 19 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (J– March 6, 1973) was an American writer and novelist.
