Daughter of Christian missionaries, Pearl Buck was reared and educated in China. She received her university education in America but returned to China in the mid-1910s. She became a university instructor and writer, eventually authoring novels about China, some of which were turned into Hollywood films, including The Good Earth (1937) and Dragon Seed (1944). She also wrote novels using the pen-name 'John Sedges', and she won the 'Nobel Prize' for Literature in 1938.