[Why was the response to Pearl Buck's early works so sweeping when they were so far from the literary vanguard?] Because they spoke to the poverty and uncertainty of the times. There hovered over them the certitudes of an inner-directed and Victorian spirit with a large and generous view of life, which could present values rather than seek them in a troubled world. In those Depression years The Good Earth's vivid and compassionate picture of the bare subsistence level of the Chinese masses fed the fires of protest against social injustice, while at the same time offering the satisfactions of a rags-to-riches tale. The rise of Wang Lung and his wife O-lan, by dogged thrift and industry, from starvation in a drought year to a position of wealth and the establishment of a family dynasty is a success story par excellence in which the underdog wins against all the odds of man and nature…. (pp. 90-1)

There were other aspects of The Good Earth and The Mother that must have been especially appealing to those times. To an East wracked by social revolution, and a West whose moral and economic fabric increasingly gave way, the strong, dignified, and uncomplex narratives of the immemorial Chinese peasant life, told with a simplicity that could be translated readily and understood anywhere, stressed the eternal verities of soil and season, of the fruit of the earth and the womb, the quintessential human facts of birth, love, laughter, sorrow, death. The Good Earth—how meaningful a title to all those dispossessed by want in cities. How comforting, in the midst of devastating material and spiritual flux, to glimpse stability, to be so convincingly reminded of life's perpetual self-renewal, the ever returning spring after winter in the changeless cycle of the earth's turning. It was the expression of a peculiarly Eastern view, its symbol the cycle, the circle, its source in conceptions of karma and reincarnation. Certainly the cyclic form appears over and over in Pearl Buck's novels of the thirties. (pp. 90-1)

If there was any public and critical consensus before her Nobel award (she was ignored by some of the highbrow critics from first to last), it was typified by the words of J. Donald Adams of the New York Times, who wrote, "She has rendered the life of a people deeply alien from ourselves in terms of universal human values." (p. 93)

The modern reader, in fact, is struck by a curious paradox in this regard: it is exactly how un-foreign these novels seem. Moving in a vivid world of Chinese custom, in a spiritual landscape seen always understandingly through Chinese eyes, Pearl Buck's major characters of that period were, nevertheless, so "universal," so recognizable anywhere, as to seem only incidentally "Chinese." One gets no real sense in these novels of an ethos that was in actuality profoundly different from the West. Nowhere, for example, is it shown what constitutes a Taoist, Buddhist or Confucian, their distinctions and similarities, or their considerable distances from European thought (although some pervasive aspects of their philosophies affected her writing). Pearl Buck was not interested in stressing differences. Out of intense conviction she aimed, unconsciously in these first books perhaps, to demonstrate similarity in order to promote understanding, to allow the West to cross the gap—or rather to show there was no human gap at all, only a factitious cultural one. (pp. 93-4)

The biographies [of Pearl Buck's parents] were powerful considerations in swinging the award that year, and Selma Lagerlöf personally told Pearl Buck that they were the decisive factor in her own favorable vote.

Of greater significance in explaining the Swedish response, however, was Pearl Buck's transmutation of her religious heritage into a lively egalitarianism that might be said to parallel the Swedish translation of its historically intense religiosity into the most advanced social legislation of the Western democracies. Each was putting the Christian ethic into action. If O'Neill sought God, Pearl Buck accepted Him and went on to do good works. Neutralist Sweden responded heartily to this apolitical, supra-national idealist, whose dual cultural tradition and subsequent world-wide travel had given her an objectivity of vision beyond the usual national myopias, who had widely proclaimed in print her antitotalitarian principles…. (pp. 95-6)

No doubt the committee members felt that in Pearl Buck they had found a happy combination of art and idealism; and they were, after all, only following the dictum laid down for them; but the literary world, whose initial enthusiasm for The Good Earth had cooled under the uneven quality of the following works, was under no such constraint. The critics insisted on an assessment by standards of literary excellence alone and continued to grumble at the choice. They were thinking, of course, in terms of the twentieth century, in terms of Joyce, Eliot, and Kafka, while Pearl Buck's style and spirit alike stayed firmly planted in other times and other worlds, whose influences acted to confound the aesthetics by which the West was judging her…. [Her] manner was realism, strung out along the straightforward chronology of a presumed objective time. Her work contained neither experiment with form nor investigation of the psyche: one could read it, safely unaware that it had been written in the era ushered in by Freud. Her leading characters were everyman—and everywoman—whose various characteristics, displayed serially in time, represented not so much the inevitable responses of a unique individual as typical and generalized human reactions in a given situation. Her minor characters were what the West had once called "humours," physical and temperamental types with the flatness natural to such creations.

The West, meantime, had been busily exchanging this horizontal novel form for a more vertical and static one of depth exploration…. (pp. 97-8)

But delineation in depth … was not Pearl Buck's mode. She was working in an idiom older even than the objective realism of the nineteenth-century West, one which had come to her by way of the folk tradition of the indigenous Chinese novel, where, as in all folk-telling, from Icelandic sagas to Homeric tales, from the Morte d'Arthur to the Shui-hu, character is given, not explained. (p. 99)

The foremost attribute of this Chinese folk tradition was, as might be expected, fast-moving action coupled with simplicity of style and vocabulary…. Furthermore, the portrayal of character had to be "by the character's own action and words rather than by the author's explanation." What an amount of European work would be excluded by such a condition, almost the whole of the modern novel and certainly all of Henry James. (pp. 100-01)

[It] seems that the frequent and accepted use in Chinese fiction of the anecdotal, the apparently fortuitous happening, coincidence, or any unexpected turn of the story, has to do with an age-old preoccupation of the Chinese mind with the chance aspect of events, as opposed to the emphasis the West places on causality….

All these influences bear directly on Pearl Buck's work. We note the strict authorial distance kept in most of her early Chinese novels. (p. 102)

To explain, however, is never to explain away. We may illuminate the forces in her working against a unified approach, but it is the question of that final lack that is important. For the trouble was not that Pearl Buck used an outdated Western novel form, modified by Chinese influences (or the other way about), but that she never mastered either form in its purity, nor succeeded in her efforts at a synthesis. She came closest in her pre-Nobel novels, and of these The Good Earth remains by far the best, in its proportions and in its unity of style and content. Both The Good Earth and The Mother have an emotional coherence lent by the passionate respect and admiration for the Chinese peasant that came pouring out when she sat down to write of them. (pp. 102-03)

But in the sequels to The Good Earth her technical deficiencies dominate. Sons has all the ingredients of a major tragic figure in the character of Wang Lung's son who becomes a smáll-time Chinese war lord…. But it is never realized…. A House Divided pursues Wang the Tiger's son through increasingly complex modern urban environments (including the United States and Shanghai), following the unfolding of his mind as it comes to grips with China's revolution and the modern world in general. But the simplified style of the peasant epics, though still employed, is no longer fitting; the "show, not tell" dictate of the Chinese novelists is left behind, yet without the benefits that modern Western techniques would have conferred in the exploration of inner growth; and the formless sprawl of this novel, while perhaps true to life, needed the shaping of an artist's control to carry the conviction of truth that is the only essential for the reader. (pp. 103-04)

[Pearl Buck] seemed gradually to cease caring about development of the novel as an expressive art form and to pursue more and more its uses as propaganda, making less and less distinction between her aesthetic and her "missionary" aims. Many of her later novels became largely vehicles for her humanitarian themes. She was her father's daughter; there was something of the sermon or the tract about them: story was the mere sugar-coating to make the medicine go down. (p. 106)

There seems to be no real quarrel with the low critical estimation of the main body of her work. Pearl Buck wrote in careless haste (her books now total over seventy) with predictable results. A good tale well told has always been a solace and a satisfaction to mankind. But even when the dross settles from her prodigious and uneven output, it will be difficult to redress the balance of her later books, which display at one time or another, and sometimes all at once, careless lack of control of point of view, cliché characters, a sentimental Pollyannaism, a scarcely veiled didacticism, and a lack of depth despite a breadth of theme. (p. 108)

Pearl Buck's fiction is indeed too simple for adults in our effete and complex age. For when the means are crude, illusion, on which all realistic art depends, collapses. Such work is then convincing only to the young, which is to say the unsophisticated of any age, who are credulous, and, like all primitive beings, more open to illusion than the worldly. Only a Candide can believe Pangloss, and events teach him not to. Now that her work is no longer a revelation of the Orient (though this quality gives it some lasting historical value), it is read not so much by all the people as by the young…. [Everywhere] it is the idealist, one whose youthful hopefulness has not been eroded by experience. He can share her essential optimism, her belief that human nature is basically good and the world perfectible by rational means. (pp. 108-09)

Nevertheless, a contemporary evaluation depends on whether Pearl Buck is to be judged as an artist or humanitarian, and as always that decision turns on the bias of the commentator. Thus Kenneth Tynan, reviewing in 1959 her play A Desert Incident, which debated the degree to which scientists are morally responsible for the use to which their knowledge is put, first tore the piece to shreds on aesthetic grounds, but then supported the author because of her thesis and conclusions. "I realize that considerations like these are not supposed to affect the judgment of a theater critic," Mr. Tynan concluded, "yet she chose the most important subject in the world, and though she handled it vaguely and emotionally, she came down on the side of life…. Because of her choice and her commitment, I am prepared to forgive Miss Buck a good deal." (pp. 109-10)