Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro , West Virginia . Her parents were Southern Presbyterian missionaries, stationed in China . She married in 1917, and immediately moved to Nanhsuchou (Nanxuzhou) in rural Anhwei ( Anhui ) province. In this impoverished Chinese community, Pearl Buck gathered the material that she would later use in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Good Earth . In 1938, less than a decade after her first book had appeared, Pearl won the Nobel Prize in literature, the first American woman to do so.