Upon the publication of her best-selling novel The Good Earth (1931), Pearl S. Buck became the premier interpreter of China for a generation of readers in the United States. In the view of Asian American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, Buck's achievement was no less than to have made 'Asian voices heard, for the first time, in Western literature.' An astounding number of novels, short stories, film scripts, magazine articles, nonfiction books, and volumes of pieces flowed from Buck, though her reputation as a writer ultimately stemmed from The Good Earth and its remarkable success. Buck had impressed her audience as an American whose long residency in China and life experiences gave her unique insight into Chinese culture. Soon after the novel's publication, however, Buck returned to the United States and never again set foot in China for the remaining decades of her life. Her career as a leading China commentator in the 1930s and 1940s was thus founded largely on the authority of a single work of fiction. The unprecedented popularity of a novel about so unlikely a subject as the life of a Chinese peasant formed the basis for an area of expertise that was superseded only by the changed conditions of the Cold War in the late 1940s and 1950s, when a new generation of university-trained China experts emerged.