First American Woman to win Nobel Prize in Literature -- on this date in 1938

from Writer's Almanac (American Public Media, Garrison Keillor):
On December 10, 1938 American writer Pearl Buck received the Nobel Prize in literature for The Good Earth (1931), a novel about the life of a farming family in a Chinese village on the eve of World War I. Buck was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, and she was chosen above writers like Mark Twain and Theodore Dreiser, which caused some derision. William Faulkner, in particular, was still snippy about the award a decade later, when he received his own Nobel Prize.
Pearl Buck spent a year in an attic in Nanjing writing the book. The child of missionaries, she’d spent more than four decades in China, mostly living in the highest house in Zhenjiang, on Cloud Scaling Hill. About her life as an American living in China, she said: “I grew up in a double world, the small white clean Presbyterian American world of my parents and the big, loving, merry, not too clean Chinese world, and there was no communication between them. When I was in the Chinese world, I was Chinese. I spoke Chinese and behaved as a Chinese and ate as the Chinese did, and I shared their thoughts and feelings. When I was in the American world, I shut the door between.”