THE ENEMY
Can you name these symbols? What is the common denominator?
HOW CAN A SYMBOL CARRY SO MUCH POWER?
BYSTANDER EFFECT
About the Author: PEAR S. BUCK
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia, U.S.A. Her parents,
Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries, stationed in China,
where she spent most of the first forty years of her life.
The Sydenstrickers lived in Chinkiang, in Kiangsu
(Jiangsu) province, then a small city lying at the junction of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal.
Pearl's father spent months away from home, itinerating in the Chinese countryside in search of
Christian converts. From childhood, Pearl spoke both English and Chinese.
In 1910, Pearl enrolled in Randolph-Macon Women’s College, in Lynchburg, Virginia, from which she
graduated in 1914. In 1915, she met a young Cornell graduate, an agricultural economist named John
Lossing Buck. They married in 1917, and immediately moved to Nanhsuchou (Nanxuzhou) in rural
Anhwei (Anhui) province. In this impoverished community, Pearl Buck gathered the material that she
would later use in The Good Earth and other stories of China.
From 1920 to 1933, Pearl and Lossing
made their home in Nanking (Nanjing), on the campus of Nanking University, where both had teaching
positions.
Pearl had begun to publish stories and essays in the 1920s, in magazines such as Nation, The Chinese
Recorder, Asia, and Atlantic Monthly. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published by the John
Day Company in 1930. In 1931, John Day published Pearl's second novel, The Good Earth. This became
the best-selling book of both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal in 1935, and
would be adapted as a major MGM film in 1937. In 1938, less than a decade after her first book had
appeared, Pearl won the Nobel Prize in literature, the first American woman to do so. By the time of her
death in 1973, Pearl would publish over seventy books: novels, collections of stories, biography and
autobiography, poetry, drama, children's literature, and translations from the Chinese. Pearl Buck died
in March, 1973, just two months before her eighty-first birthday. She is buried at Green Hills Farm.
Rural China 1941
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