Pearl S. Buck at Green Hills Farm

The farmhouse visible here in Bucks County was the American home of Pearl S. Buck, one of the most widely read novelists of the twentieth century. Buck grew up in China, the daughter of American missionaries, and it was China she wrote about in her most celebrated novel, The Good Earth, published in nineteen thirty-one. It won the Pulitzer Prize in nineteen thirty-two and became a central work in the argument that American readers could care deeply about lives far from their own.

In nineteen thirty-eight, Buck received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American woman to win that honor. The Nobel committee cited her epic portrayals of Chinese farm life. She bought Green Hills Farm in nineteen thirty-three and made it her permanent home after returning from China, living here until the late nineteen sixties, when she moved to Vermont, where she died in nineteen seventy-three. The farm later became home to the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which she created to support children of mixed Asian and American heritage who had been left behind by war.