Pearl S. Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, in 1892. She spent most of her life before 1934 in China, first as a missionary's daughter and later as a missionary herself. She later founded adoption and foster programs for mixed-race and Asian children, and the work grew into Pearl S. Buck International.
Her best-known novel, The Good Earth (1931), was the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and is the first of the House of Earth trilogy with Sons and A House Divided. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, the William Dean Howells Medal in 1935 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938. She died in Danby, Vermont, in 1973.
Source: Wikipedia