Best-Seller's Complaint

Novelist Pearl Buck has published eleven books, and five of them have been bestsellers. But at a Manhattan booksellers' luncheon fortnight ago, Pearl Buck stepped out as the most resourceful U. S. critic of bestsellers, found a dozen new reasons for denouncing lists of them. Bestseller lists are usually criticized on the grounds that they are inaccurate or incomplete (TIME, March 7), but Author Buck objected to their influence on writers ("It's the worst thing that can happen to you, not to be on that list--if you are a novelist"); their influence on the public ("The best-seller list is ... an iron mold clamped upon the public mind"); on publishers and booksellers.

Documenting her case with her own experience, Author Buck confessed that she wrote her biggest bestseller, The Good Earth (estimated sales: 200,000), as a potboiler. A best-seller is easy to write, she said; the big question is whether a writer wants to follow his success with another book like it and so keep on best-seller lists. Not being read is "a disconcerting, irritating sort of thing--more than that, it is downright maddening." And in the U. S., which has the most capricious book-buying audience in the world, writers learn that they are being read only when they see their books among the leaders in the season's sales. Shall a novelist, asked Pearl Buck, "go on writing to get on the best-seller list, or shall he consider his own soul and write honestly from it?" For herself, she said, except for The Good Earth she had written what she wanted to write. But she would like to see authors, publishers and booksellers get together, abolish best-seller lists entirely.

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