The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck
Summary
Wang Lung is a poor farmer in a northern Chinese village, and on the novel's first morning he walks to the great House of Hwang to collect his bride: O-lan, a kitchen slave, plain, silent and tireless. The book's first hundred pages are their partnership, told at the pace of work itself: fields bought scrap by scrap from the decaying Hwangs, children born with O-lan back at the harvest the same afternoon, the land accumulating under them like a slow tide.
Then famine empties the province, and the family takes the train south to a city where they pull rickshaws and beg, and where a night of revolutionary looting puts gold in Wang Lung's hands. Buck refuses to prettify what follows: the same man who suffered lands on the winning side of chance, returns, buys the Hwangs' own land, and hardens with each acre. He takes the tea house courtesan Lotus into his house as a concubine while O-lan, who has borne everything, goes on serving, and her death, preceded by the book's most quietly devastating scene over two pearls she wanted to keep, is the novel's moral centre. It ends with Wang Lung old among sons who, over his head, are already agreeing to sell the land.
The prose is deliberately biblical, plain and rhythmic, and reads with almost no friction ninety years on.
Around three hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want the saga that taught two generations of Americans everything they thought they knew about rural China, and a portrait of a marriage as unsentimental as any in the language.
Historical Context & Significance
The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932 after being the bestselling American novel of both 1931 and 1932, and it carried Pearl Buck to the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American woman to win it.
She had the authority of residence: the daughter of missionaries, she grew up in China speaking Chinese, lived through the upheavals of the era, and wrote the book in Nanking from direct observation of village life. The 1937 MGM film was a prestige success, and historians still debate how much the book's sympathetic peasants shaped American feeling toward China against Japan, though the sober conclusion is that policy moved for other reasons.
The criticism has two lives. In its day the novel was resented in many Chinese quarters for airing poverty and concubinage; later scholarship questioned any outsider's China carrying that much cultural weight. Meanwhile the book simply kept selling, returning to the bestseller lists as recently as 2004, when Oprah Winfrey chose it, seventy three years after publication.