Pearl Buck

On December 10, 1938, novelist, essayist, and civil rights activist Pearl S. Buck(June 26, 1892–March 6, 1973) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.” Buck was born in China to American missionary parents and spent the first four decades of her life living there — an experience she wove into her beloved book The Good Earth, which had won the Pulitzer Prize six years earlier. 

Although three other women had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature prior to Buck, she was and remains the youngest female laureate — at 46, she was nineteen years younger than the average laureate in the category and the third-youngest to that point, after Rudyard Kipling and, only narrowly, Harry Sinclair Lewis. The only younger laureate since Buck has been Albert Camus. 

She also wrote the excellent The Big Wave which I will use in a lit unit supporting our Japanese LOTE program later in the year.