June 26, 1892: Pearl S. Buck is born.
Pearl S. Buck was a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author most famous for her 1931 novel The Good Earth, and for her advocacy of the rights of women and minorities; in 1938, she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a feat which attracted her much derision from male authors, one of whom remarked“if she can get it, anybody can". She is also one of two American women to have received both Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes. Buck was also notable and unique in the subject matter of many of her novels. Born to American missionaries, Buck grew up near Nanking, China, and incorporated her direct experiences within the culture into her novels during a time when the most common depictions of the Chinese came in the form of “Yellow Peril" cartoons and fiction, when they were depicted at all. The average American knew little about China, and what they did know was based on an amalgam of unfavorable stereotypes. When The Good Earth (which featured - with no exoticism - a family of Chinese peasants) was published, the Chinese Exclusion Act was nearly fifty years old, but her popular novel helped to facilitate its repeal by presenting a different image of China to the average American and "demythologizing China and the Chinese people in the American mind".
And, although she was the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, she was not hesitant to criticize Christian evangelism in China, specifically noting in her 1932 public talk “Is there a Case for the Foreign Missionary?" that Western evangelists ignorant of Chinese culture and philosophy often held themselves above the evangelized, concluding that there was no place for this sort of mission in the life of the average Chinese person. For these sentiments she was labeled "psychopathic" by the general secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions.
Buck was a prolific writer after the publication of The Good Earth, but none of her later works achieved the same success as her earlier novel. However, she remained a prominent activist, contributing to NAACP and National Urban League magazines regularly, protesting colonialism with W.E.B. Du Bois, speaking out against Japanese internment, and promoting modern birth control and the Equal Rights Amendment. Her activism even earned the attention of the FBI, who suspected she might be an agitator (although she was also anti-communist), and her FBI file eventually reached nearly 300 pages. Her activism continued until her death in 1973.