Three universities, two in the United States and one in China are connected with the Pettus Beijing’s language college—Nanjing University (where Buck lived and wrote such works as The Good Earth in a house that still stands on the campus), her alma mater, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, and Claremont Graduate University. 

The way that we first discovered the small piece of information about Pearl Buck we had found in the Pettus archives was like this:   

We found a letter from Pettus to a member of his college board.  In an innocent chance aside from a busy day in 1932, Pettus mentioned that an agricultural scholar friend, John Lossing Buck, was staying at the college with his "American wife and author Pearl Buck."   

Further into that same box of letters we found another from Pettus about the "wife" of Lossing.  She was becoming a well known writer, and Pettus, presumably chauvinistically began to give her greater attention.  Our archives show that this relationship grew over the years.  One can imagine that visit, the teas, and the discussions -- certainly Pearl Buck was learning from the scholars passing through the halls of the college "that lovely place."  No doubt the lectures Pearl Buck gave (published in the booklet with the College cover) were refined and improved upon.  In a Communication Project workshop in Claremont, we compared these 1932 lectures with her 1938 Nobel Prize speech on the same topic. This workshop with Professor Pan was a considerable success and most interesting. 

I mentioned these two letters in an email to a Nanjing scholar Liu Haiping who had done much work about Buck in China (and risked political punishment once in 1986 for his holding a conference on Pearl Buck).  He wrote excitedly back that these letters found in our Pettus archives revealed new information that the world did not know about her months in Beijing.

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