Absalom Sydenstricker

Who was Absalom Sydenstricker?

Absalom Sydenstricker was an American Presbyterian missionary to China from 1880 to 1931. The Sydenstricker log house at the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace in Hillsboro, West Virginia was Absalom's early childhood home.

His daughter, Pearl S. Buck, became an award-winning author. The book Fighting Angel, written as a companion to her memoir of her mother, The Exile, recounts the life and work of Absalom. Her representation of her father was conflicted between respect for his steadfastness, and bitterness for his treatment of her mother and for his closed minded attitude towards China. She wrote that his was

the story... of one soul and its march through time to its appointed end. For this soul there was birth, predestined, a duty to be done and it was done, and there was heaven at the end – that was the whole story. There was nothing of the lives of people in it, no merriment of feasts, no love of joy, no tales of death. ... There was nothing in it of empire or emperors or revolutions or of all the stir of changing human times. There was no reflection upon the minds and manners of men or any subtlety of philosophies. The tale was told as simply as the sun rises out of the dawn, marches swiftly across the firmament, to set in its own glory.