The Good Earth

A measure of the quality, prescience, and veracity of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth is that, nearly a century after its first publication, the book remains required reading in literature, world history, and social science courses. The novel is a simple, straightforward narrative about 50 years in the life of Wang Lung, an uneducated farmer in eastern China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While this era period was one of continual political turbulence in China, Wang Lung’s personal struggle centers on securing good harvests, purchasing more land, and building a lasting foundation for his growing family. To accomplish this, he must work around tempestuous nature, unscrupulous relatives, opportunistic soldiers and brigands, and other common people who, like him, are just trying to survive. His greatest ally is his wife, O-lan. Like the land itself, she is fertile, dependable, and completely accepting.

Growing up in China in the 1890s as the child of Christian missionaries, Buck watched many of the changes she writes about firsthand. The first of a trilogy, the book received a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and was the bestselling novel in the US in 1931 (the year of its initial publication) and 1932.