"One pays the price for being prolific," bestselling author Pearl S. Buck once told an interviewer. "Heaven knows the literary Establishment can't forgive me for it, nor for the fact that my books sell." In retrospect, Buck's assessment of her own career seems to ring true. Despite the fact that she enjoyed world-wide popularity throughout most of her life (at the time of her death, her books had been translated into more languages than any other American writer), critical success eluded her after the prize-winning decade that produced The Good Earth and the biographical work The Spirit and the Flesh. Suspicious of her tremendously high output and annoyed by her all-too-frequent lapses into didacticism and sentimentality, post-1938 critics regarded her for the most part as a prime example of a "too much, too often" writer.

The only child of Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker to be born in the...