The Good Earth
by Pearl Buck
Summary
Wang Lung, a poor farmer in early twentieth century China, marries O-lan, a formerly enslaved kitchen servant with no dowry and no beauty anyone comments on, and the marriage turns out to be the making of him: O-lan works the fields beside him without complaint, bears him sons, and quietly proves shrewder than Wang Lung himself at exactly the moments that matter most. Together they buy up land, plot by plot, from the once grand House of Hwang as that family's fortunes decline, until famine drives Wang Lung's own household off the land entirely and into a southern city, where he pulls a rickshaw for pennies and O-lan and the children beg in the streets to survive. A mob's riot against a wealthy local household, breaking out just as Wang Lung is swept up in the chaos, hands the family an unlikely windfall: Wang Lung extorts money by threatening a terrified rich man he stumbles across, and O-lan, separately, finds a hoard of jewels hidden in the looted house, and the family rides that sudden money straight back to their own land and into real prosperity.
Prosperity changes Wang Lung in ways poverty never did. He buys a concubine, Lotus, and coldly takes O-lan's own pearls to give Lotus as earrings, a small, plain cruelty that O-lan absorbs without argument the way she has absorbed everything else, and she dies not long after, worn out by a life of labor Wang Lung's new wealth never lightened for her. By the novel's end Wang Lung is an old man living in the Hwangs' former mansion, the very symbol of the status he spent his whole life climbing toward, and the book's last scene finds him overhearing his own sons quietly planning to sell the ancestral land the moment he dies, the same land he fought his entire life to buy and hold, already treated by the next generation as nothing more than money waiting to be converted back into cash.
Pearl Buck writes rural Chinese village life without exoticizing a single detail of it, drawing on her own childhood as a missionary's daughter raised largely in China, and the result reads less like an outsider's account of a foreign place than a farmer's own unsentimental record of what land actually costs a family that depends on it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932, the year after its publication, and became the best selling American novel of both 1931 and 1932, success that helped carry Pearl Buck to the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for the rich and truly epic descriptions of Chinese peasant life and for her biographical masterpieces, an honor that made her the first American woman to win the literature prize. Buck grew up in China as the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries and drew the novel's agricultural detail from firsthand observation of village life in Anhui province rather than research conducted from a distance.
The award proved controversial among American literary critics, some of whom considered Buck a popular rather than a serious novelist and questioned whether her accessible, plainly told fiction belonged beside the Academy's more experimental laureates. The novel's reputation has outlasted that early skepticism: a 1937 film adaptation reached a wide American audience, and Oprah's Book Club brought the novel back onto national bestseller lists in 2004, more than seventy years after its first publication.