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Good Earth
by Pearl Buck
Description:
This Tells The Poignant Tale Of A Chinese Farmer And His Family In Old Agrarian China. The Humble Wang Lung Glories In The Soil He Works, Nurturing The Land As It Nurtures Him And His Family. Nearby, The Nobles Of The House Of Hwang Consider Themselves Above The Land And Its Workers; But They Will Soon Meet Their Own Downfall. Hard Times Come Upon Wang Lung And His Family When Flood And Drought Force Them To Seek Work In The City. The Working People Riot, Breaking Into The Homes Of The Rich And Forcing Them To Flee. When Wang Lung Shows Mercy To One Noble And Is Rewarded, He Begins To Rise In The World, Even As The House Of Hwang Falls.
About The Author
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973; also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu; Chinese: 賽珍珠) was an American writer and novelist. As the daughter of missionaries, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces”. She was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
After returning to the United States in 1935, she continued writing prolifically and became a prominent advocate of the rights of women and minority groups, and wrote widely on Asian cultures, becoming particularly well known for her efforts on behalf of Asian and mixed-race adoption.By awarding this year’s Prize to Pearl Buck for the notable works which pave the way to a human sympathy passing over widely separated racial boundaries and for the studies of human ideals which are a great and living art of portraiture, the Swedish Academy feels that it acts in harmony and accord with the aim of Alfred Nobel’s dreams for the future.
In her speech to the Academy, she took as her topic “The Chinese Novel.” She explained, “I am an American by birth and by ancestry”, but “my earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China.” After an extensive discussion of classic Chinese novels, especially Romance of the Three Kingdoms, All Men Are Brothers, and Dream of the Red Chamber, she concluded that in China “the novelist did not have the task of creating art but of speaking to the people.” Her own ambition, she continued, had not been trained toward “the beauty of letters or the grace of art.” In China, the task of the novelist differed from the Western artist: “To farmers he must talk of their land, and to old men he must speak of peace, and to old women he must tell of their children, and to young men and women he must speak of each other.” And like the Chinese novelist, she concluded, “I have been taught to want to write for these people. If they are reading their magazines by the million, then I want my stories there rather than in magazines read only by a few.”
Skryf Review
Amazing Read.When the earth suffers, women suffer– when women suffer the earth suffers. I think this is what Buck captured so beautifully in her book. She is a brilliant feminist writer!Through her character O-lan, Buck makes the argument that all of man’s (in the story Wang-lung)increase and prosperity comes because of his reliance on the “good earth”, which refers not only to his land but also to his good woman. Without his woman he would have had none of the prosperity he enjoys! The tragedy is that he doesn’t appreciate what he has and the woman suffers. My heart just ached for O-lan and she reminded me that so many woman in the world live similar lives. So many women bring forth fruit, raise it and cultivate it, in silence. They are trampled on, destroyed and unappreciated.Life would cease to exist without the earth, just as life would cease to exist without women.