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Soon after they returned to China, an anti-Western uprising forced Buck’s family to hide in a poor Chinese family’s hut.

for a year in the mid-1920s, during which time Buck went to graduate school at Cornell. In 1920 the couple moved to Nanjing, where Buck taught English literature at a university. She married another missionary, John Buck, in 1917, and they lived in Anhui Province, where much of The Good Earth takes place. After her graduation, she received news that her mother was ill, so she applied to become a missionary and returned to China, where she worked for eighteen years. In 1911, she returned to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, in Virginia.

Buck herself spoke both English and Chinese. Buck attended a Western school in Shanghai, where her classmates’ racist views of Chinese people contrasted with her parents’ beliefs in racial equality.

During the Boxer Rebellion-an uprising against foreign and Christian forces-Buck’s family lost most of their Chinese friends, but Buck’s father refused to believe the Chinese would actually harm him. Her parents worked as Presbyterian missionaries. Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, but moved to China with her parents when she was only five months old.