Though Wang Lung gets temporarily caught up in the trappings of wealth (taking on a concubine and dressing himself in lavish silk robes), he eventually grows to re-appreciate the simple life of a hard-working farmer. The novel follows the life of Wang Lung, a poor farmer in Anhui province who gradually, through both hard work and unexpected fortune, acquires more land and money than he had ever dreamed of owning. This story originally appeared on Asia Blog partner site ChinaFile, a new online magazine from Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. For my inaugural "Re-Reading" column, I decided to return to The Good Earth, the first book I ever read about China, when it was assigned in a world history course during my freshman year of high school. In 2004, however, American readers flocked back to the novel after Oprah Winfrey selected it as a title for her popular book club. As Jonathan Spence notes in his New York Review of Books article on Pearl Buck: Journey to the Good Earth, even sympathetic biographer Hilary Spurling cannot help but describe Buck’s plot choices as “preposterous” at times.Īfter the Communist victory over mainland China in 1949, which received crucial support from the country's vast rural hinterland, The Good Earth, which had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932, fell out of fashion in the McCarthy-era United States for its association with revolutionary peasants. While many early readers hailed her work for its realistic descriptions of life in the Chinese countryside, critics derided The Good Earth as saccharine and simplistic.
This is not, I trust, a controversial statement: Pearl Buck’s 1931 novel suffered a mixed reputation from the start. The Good Earth simultaneously manages to be both a classic and not very good.
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