From Will Smith to the Roots, Jennifer Weiner to Lisa Scottoline, Pearl Buck to Edgar Allen Poe, the city has often inspired the written word.

FORBES: Philadelphia: The City That Taxes You Back

Berhman, Pearl Buck, Edna Ferber, Maxwell Anderson.

NPR: The 'Fabulous Lunts,' Alive at Ten Chimneys

Roosevelt, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, and the novelist Pearl Buck, who'd won the Nobel Prize in 1938 and whose picture he copied from the jacket of one of her bestsellers.

NPR: Roth Rewrites History with a 'Plot Against America'

The first paperback printed in the U.S. was an edition of The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck printed by Pocket Books in 1938.

FORBES: Why Public Libraries Matter: And How They Can Do More

She raised seven adopted children and wrote many later works at her farm in suburban Bucks County, where she's buried and where her namesake nonprofit, Pearl S. Buck International, is based.

WSJ: Newly found Pearl S. Buck book is to be published