Death of Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck died on 6 March 1973 in Danby, aged 80. An American writer, Pearl S. Buck grew up in China, where her parents worked as Presbyterian missionaries, and she spoke Chinese before English. Her best-known novel, The Good Earth, published in 1931, portrays the life of a Chinese peasant family and won the Pulitzer Prize, bringing a sympathetic picture of rural China to Western readers. In 1938 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American woman to do so. She wrote dozens of other books and was an activist for civil rights, women's rights and the rights of children. She founded an adoption agency for children of mixed Asian and American parentage and established a foundation to support them.

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