Life in Nanking was markedly different from the simple life in North China. Here, Western ideas were replacing traditional Chinese customs, and Bolshevist ideas were threatening the traditional Chinese political and social structures. The Chinese youth of Nanking were both seduced and confused by these rapidly changing ideas. Pearl Buck, through her work at the University of Nanking, was very aware of this confusion and rebellion and used them in Chapters 12, 13, and 14 of The Good Earth. During these years, she also wrote many essays on the changes within China, some of which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Forum, and The Nation.
In 1925, John and Pearl Buck brought their first child to the United States, hoping that medical treatment could correct what they feared were signs of mental disorder. While in the United States, Pearl and John both attended Cornell University where, in the following year, Pearl took her Master of Arts degree in English literature. To help finance this trip to the United States, Pearl entered and won the Laura Messenger Prize in history for her essay "China and the West," again bringing together her two worlds.
In late 1926, Pearl and John Buck returned to their Nanking home to teach at Southeastern University and the University of Nanking, respectively. However, in March 1927, Nationalist soldiers attacked Nanking and began killing Caucasians. Pearl, John, their daughter, and Pearl's father were forced to flee Nanking for Shanghai, just as her family had fled during the Boxer Rebellion in 1905. Among the possessions which she was forced to leave behind was a completed but unpublished novel which was destroyed by the looting soldiers. Fortunately, the biography of her mother was left untouched, as was an incomplete novel, which, in 1930, became East Wind: West Wind, her first published novel.
In 1931, Pearl Buck published The Good Earth, the novel that won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize and international recognition. In the years from 1931-35, she published several other works, including Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935), which were published with The Good Earth as a trilogy in 1935. This trilogy, House of Earth, was awarded the William Dean Howells Medal by the American Academy of Arts and Letters as the finest work of fiction within the years 1930-35.
