Pearl S. Buck · 1931
The Good Earth
大地
· 1931 ·
“There is no other way to live than with the land. With the land, a man knows what he is. Without it, he is nothing.”
Begin ReadingIn the early twentieth century, a poor farmer named Wang Lung takes a slave for a wife and begins a life bound to the soil. Over decades, their hard work, their luck, and their desperate choices transform them from peasants into landowners — and then into the very kind of people they once despised. Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth is the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize, made Buck the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and introduced the Chinese peasant to the Western imagination with an empathy that still resonates.
“If you sell the land, it is the end.”
— The Good Earth
Published in 1931 by the John Day Company, The Good Earth was an immediate sensation. It stayed on the bestseller lists for two years, sold millions of copies, and was translated into more than thirty languages. It is the first volume of The House of Earth trilogy — a family saga, a portrait of a nation in transition, and a meditation on the one thing that has anchored Chinese civilization for millennia: the land itself. This site is your guide to its world.