From the Chinese

THE FIRST WIFE, and Other Stories--Pearl S. Buck--John Day ($2.50).

No writer of modern times has staked a claim to a bigger tract than Authoress Buck. For U. S. readers, at least. China is her acknowledged province; so far she has the field to herself. The Good Earth, which won her the Pulitzer Prize (1931) and made her name a household word in the U. S., was a best-seller for 24 months--not equalled by any other U. S. novel. Says Introducer Richard J. Walsh: "It seems clear that no native Chinese, however schooled in English prose, could have written of his own people as Mrs. Buck has written of them." Some captious critics think Authoress Buck's reputation as unsubstantial as China's boundaries, but plain readers who do not worry their heads about literary hierarchies continue to read her with pleasure & profit. This collection of stories about China, though somewhat over-reverently introduced by Publisher Walsh of John Day Co., speaks for itself.

Authoress Buck is a converted missionary. Her life among the Chinese has convinced her that men are indeed brothers under their skins. Her publicly professed desire for a "creedless faith" led to her resignation as a Presbyterian missionary (TIME, May 8), but in her novels and stories she continues to preach her creedless doctrine. The 14 stories in The First Wife show Chinese torn between Western ideas and their own traditions, drowned by revolution, inundated by famine-spreading Hoods, but always pathetically human, essentially understandable. Some of her people: A wife who has waited seven years for her husband to return from Western lands discovers that he has been educated out of her world. An old mother slowly learns that her new-fangled son begrudges her a place in his home. A poor farmer, caught in a wave of revolution, finds that his share of the mystical millennium is small. The father of a family marooned by a flood, starving to death, remembers that girls are worth less than boys.

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