(13 May 1917 - 11 June 1935) (divorced) (1 child)
She married an agricultural economist missionary John Lossing Buck, on May 13, 1917, and they moved to Suzhou, Anhui Province, a small town on the Huai River (not to be confused with the better-known Suzhou in Jiangsu Province). This region she describes in her books The Good Earth and Sons.
From 1920 to 1933, the Bucks made their home in Nanjing, on the campus of the University of Nanking, where both had teaching positions. Buck taught English literature at the private, church-run University of Nanking 金陵大學, Ginling College 金陵女子大学 and at the National Central University 國立中央大學. In 1920, the Bucks had a daughter, Carol, afflicted with phenylketonuria. In 1921, Buck's mother died of a tropical disease, sprue, and shortly afterward her father moved in. In 1924, they left China for John Buck's year of sabbatical and returned to the United States for a short time, during which Pearl Buck earned her master's degree from Cornell University. In 1925, the Bucks adopted Janice (later surnamed Walsh). That autumn, they returned to China.
When John Lossing Buck took the family to Ithaca the next year, Pearl accepted an invitation to address a luncheon of Presbyterian women at the Astor Hotel in New York City. Her talk was titled “Is There a Case for the Foreign Missionary?” and her answer was a barely qualified “no.” She told her American audience that she welcomed Chinese to share her Christian faith, but argued that China did not need an institutional church dominated by missionaries who were too often ignorant of China and arrogant in their attempts to control it. When the talk was published in Harper's magazine, the scandalized reaction led Pearl to resign her position with the Presbyterian Board. In 1934, Pearl left China, never to return, while John Lossing Buck remained and later remarried.