Writer Pearl S. Buck was a remarkable cultural envoy who played a pioneering role in demystifying China in the American mind in the early 20th century, said scholars at a symposium on Pearl S. Buck and her Nanjing years at Nanjing University.
The symposium is one of the events the university is hosting to celebrate its 110th anniversary on Sunday. Around 20 scholars and writers from around the world gathered to exchange their views.
When she was only 3 months old, Buck's parents, Southern Presbyterian missionaries, brought her to China, where she spent most of the first 40 years of her life.
In 1931, she published her second novel, The Good Earth, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal in 1935. In 1938, less than a decade after her first book appeared, she won the Nobel Prize in literature, the first American woman to do so.
