The Pearl S. Buck Crabapple grows at Green Hill, her home and final resting place in Bucks County , Pennsylvania . Pearl was born in 1892, to Southern Presbyterian missionary parents. At the age of three the Sydenstricker family went to China , where Pearl would stay for forty years. In 1931, she published The Good Earth , which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. In 1938 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1973, she died at the age of 80 and, as she instructed, was buried beneath a large ash tree at Green Hills Farm, with the tombstone inscription of her name depicted in Chinese characters .