Always a humanitarian who felt the results of racial prejudice while in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1905 and the uprisings of 1927, Pearl Buck took up such causes as the suffering immigrants of New York City in the New York Times (November 16, 1954); India's fight for independence (she was one of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Foundation founders), and the Training School at Vineland, New Jersey, for the caring and treatment of the mentally ill. Miss Buck also served as a member of the national committee of the American Civil Liberties Union and often spoke out for intellectual freedom and against censorship.
But perhaps her greatest interest was in children. She was the author of a great many children's books, as well as articles on unwanted children and adoption. In 1949, she and her husband, Richard Walsh, founded Welcome Home, an adoption agency for children of Asian-American blood, especially children of servicemen who had served overseas.
Pearl S. Buck died March 6, 1973, in Danby, Vermont. In all, she was the author of over sixty books, touching sympathetically on many subjects. Especially after winning the Nobel Prize in 1938, her humanitarian preoccupations often suppressed the objective frankness of her earlier works. There are, however, moments of greatness in all of her works, and surely The Good Earth and the Nobel Prize biographies will stand as classics of literature for their simplicity of style and character portrayal.
