From Peking to Philadelphia — The East, the West, and Pearl S. Buck

Photo by Tom Bastin via Flickr History

From Peking to Philadelphia — The East, the West, and Pearl S. Buck Thom Nickels August 22, 2025 August 21, 2025

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In 1988, the Swedish Academy shocked the American literary establishment by awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Pearl S. Buck.

“The Nobel Committee had not only passed over such obvious candidates as Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson; it had given the world’s highest accolade to a former missionary and a woman.

As Robert Frost remarked, “If she can get it, anybody can.”

The Washington Post also maintained that she never again wrote anything as good as the biographies of her parents and “ The Good Earth .” It was also suggested that B