A 1913 photograph of Pearl Sydenstricker in America while a student at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Pearl was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, in 1892, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries Rev. Absalom and Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker. When she was an infant, the family returned to China and she received her early education from her mother who had been a teacher in Pocahontas County. She entered Randolph-Macon in 1910 as a philosophy major. While there, she wrote for the college’s literary magazine. Pearl graduated in 1914, returned to China, and in 1917 married John Lossing Buck.
In 1931, Pearl S. Buck published “The Good Earth” for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. She was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature which was awarded to her in 1934. She moved permanently to the United States that same year. She continued to write, and in her lifetime, she produced over 100 fiction and non-fiction works. More than 90 of her manuscripts are owned by the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation in Hillsboro. They are housed in the West Virginia and Regional History Center at WVU. (Pearl S. Buck Collection, Courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Bill Leist; ID: PSB000217)
Photographs in the “Preserving Pocahontas” Digital Library may be found at www.pocahontaspreservation.org or www.preservingpocahontas.org
If you have photographs or documents to be scanned for the county Historical Archive contact Preservation Officer B. J. Gudmundsson at 304-799-3989 or email info@pocahontaspreservation.org Prints of photographs from the archives are available.
