Pearl S. Buck

Buck's missionary parents settled her infancy in Zhenjiang on the Yangtze, where she grew up bilingual, taught Confucian classics by a family tutor alongside her mother's Bible lessons. She returned to Virginia for college at Randolph-Macon, then went back to China, marrying an agricultural economist and settling in Nanjing, where anti-foreign riots in 1927 forced the family into hiding before they fled.

The Good Earth, drawn from two decades of firsthand observation of Chinese peasant life, outsold every other American novel of the 1930s and helped make her the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1938. Her daughter Carol's severe intellectual disability, undiagnosable in China, pushed Buck into disability advocacy and, later, into founding one of the first adoption agencies for mixed-race Asian-American children.

She never saw China again; its Communist government refused her a visa decades later, and she died in Vermont in 1973.