By an edifying coincidence, the National Women's Hall of Fame opened in August, 1973, just a few months after Pearl's death. The site chosen – appropriately – was Seneca Falls, New York, where the founding convention of the struggle for women's rights had taken place in 1848. Twenty women were inducted into the Hall of Fame on its opening day: political leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Eleanor Roosevelt; the aviator Amelia Earhart; Senator Margaret Chase Smith; nurse Clara Barton; Jane Addams, Helen Keller, and Harriet Tubman; physicians Elizabeth Blackwell, Helen Brooke Taussig, and Alice Hamilton; Marian Anderson; Helen Hayes; educator Mary McLeod Bethune; Mary Cassatt; Emily Dickinson; medical researcher Florence Sabin; environmentalist Rachel Carson. And Pearl S. Buck.

It is a proud, distinguished company of women. And – as this biography has, I trust, demonstrated in abundant detail – Pearl had fully earned her place in it. Whatever the subsequent vagaries of her reputation, she had compiled a list of accomplishments that makes her eighty years seem brief. She also left a legacy of literary and philanthropic work that continues to change lives around the world.

Today, more than two decades after her death, Green Hills Farm serves as the headquarters of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. The old stone house in which Pearl lived for most of her American years has been designated a National Landmark. It stands in the middle of sixty-five acres of rolling lawns and fields, and is maintained as a museum and memorial.