When she arrived in Ithaca in 1924 to pursue a master’s degree at Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences, Pearl S. Buck was an aspiring novelist whose husband, John Lossing Buck, B.S. 1914, M.S. ’25, Ph.D. ’33, was a star acolyte of farm economist George Warren, namesake of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Warren Hall.

Over the next academic year, Pearl received influential mentorship from English professor Martin W. Sampson (A&S), with whom she would share the manuscript of her first novel, and gained the confidence to pursue a writing career. By the time the couple returned to Ithaca from China in 1932 – this time so Lossing, as he was known, could begin doctoral studies – Pearl S. Buck was a household name, newly crowned winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “The Good Earth.” Five years later she would become the first American woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China.” (Toni Morrison, M.A. ’55, was the second.)

Now, 86 years after she accepted the Nobel medal in Sweden, a historic marker near the Bucks’ first Ithaca home in 1924-25 – the parsonage of Forest Home Chapel, on Forest Home Drive – will commemorate Pearl’s work as a writer and humanitarian who introduced and championed Chinese culture to millions in the West, and the local community’s significance in her career.

“It was a brief but formative period for Pearl, because this is where she really delved into and was encouraged in her writing,” said Thomas J. Campanella, MLA ’91, professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, who spearheaded the initiative. “I wanted to help restore her legacy.”

The public is invited to the marker’s unveiling a short distance from the chapel at 11 a.m. on Dec. 8. The cast aluminum, blue-and-yellow New York State Historic Marker was funded by a William G. Pomeroy Foundation grant awarded to Campanella and community partner Historic Ithaca.

Campanella, a historian of city planning and the urban built environment -- and a Forest Home resident -- has found himself crossing paths with the Bucks numerous times, starting when he discovered “The Good Earth” as a teenager. He spent time at Nanjing University, where the Bucks taught for years, and visited the attic writing room (now a museum) where Pearl wrote “The Good Earth.” More recently, a grandson of Lossing’s through a later marriage (Pearl and Lossing divorced in 1935) was a student in the City and Regional Planning Department at Cornell.

Pearl Sydenstricker was born in West Virginia but raised in China by Presbyterian missionaries with Mandarin as her first language, and developed a keen interest in the lives of the rural peasantry, Campanella said. Married in 1917, Pearl and Lossing in 1920 had a daughter, Carol, who was severely disabled, and who Pearl’s writing helped support. Professionally, the pair developed an “extraordinary partnership” in China, Campanella wrote in a 2018 book chapter.

Lossing was invited to join Nanjing University as a professor and acting dean of an agriculture college modeled on what is now CALS. He produced the first and most extensive survey of Chinese agriculture – a project in which Campanella said Pearl played a vital role through her interviews with farmers, who trusted her personality and fluency. Without that experience, Pearl, in turn, might never have written “The Good Earth.”

The book effectively was banned in China after 1949, and she was not allowed to return. Ironically, Campanella said, “The Good Earth” may be better known there today than in the U.S. In a 2001 New York Times article, Nanjing University Professor Liu Haiping called Buck “revolutionary … the first writer to choose rural China as her subject matter. None of the Chinese writers would have done so; intellectuals wrote about urban intellectuals. Many of us feel we should include Buck as part of Chinese literature.”

Buck, who died in 1973, went on to write many more books, including novels, non-fiction, translations, biographies, young adult and children’s books. She was working on “The Good Earth” trilogy’s second book when she and Lossing returned to Ithaca in 1932, then living at 614 Wyckoff Road in Cayuga Heights.

Apart from sharing Pearl S. Buck’s Ithaca story with locals, many of whom are unaware of it, Campanella hopes the historic marker resonates with the university’s sizeable Chinese community.

“I think it will be wonderful for Chinese students to see that a person who loved their culture and nation was part of this place, too, and part of Cornell,” he said. “We need more of these kind of bonding agents to heal this messy world that we’re in now. We have enough division and strife.”

The state marker is the second in Ithaca that Campanella has led. In 2021, a marker was installed at 212 Cascadilla St., the birthplace of Verdelle Payne, a Tuskegee Airman and one of the New York state’s first Black pilots. Pomeroy Foundation marker criteria require a century to have passed after the events being recognized. Campanella is responsible for a third marker honoring jazz composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

“I relish getting people to understand and value the history that’s all about them, and this is a very visceral and high-profile way of telling stories about individuals who have passed through a place before us,” Campanella said. “We move fast as a culture, and the past recedes quickly.”