Pearl Buck 's genius as a writer lay in her ability to portray her characters in a universal manner; their joys, sorrows, problems, and disillusionments transcend cultural barriers to become understandable to all readers. Buck's earlier works, most of them portrayals of Chinese characters and subjects, appropriately made her the bridge between the Eastern and Western worlds, China and America. She wrote more than sixty novels, several nonfiction essays and children's books, and numerous short stories. There are more than a hundred different books attributed to her. Buck's fame as a novelist has tended to draw attention away from her short stories, but to appreciate her art fully, one cannot ignore them; they capsulize themes that were often reworked in her novels.

Pearl Sydenstricker was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, on 26 June 1892. Her parents, Absalom and Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker, were missionaries and took Pearl, at the age of...