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The Good Earth

by Pearl S. Buck

Other authors: See the other authors section.

Series: The House of Earth Trilogy (1)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
13,428262420 (4.02)667
Classic Literature. Fiction. HTML:

The Pulitzer Prizeâ??winning, New York Timesâ??bestselling novel about a peasant farmer and his family in early twentieth-century China.
The Good Earth is Buck's classic story of Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant farmer, and his wife, O-lan, a former slave. With luck and hard work, the couple's fortunes improve over the years: They have sons, and save steadily until one day they can afford to buy property in the House of Wangâ??the very house in which O-lan used to work. But success brings with it a new set of problems. Wang soon finds himself the target of jealousy, and as good harvests come and go, so does the social order. Will Wang's family cherish the estate after he's gone? And can his material success, the bedrock of his life, guarantee anything about his soul?

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Award, The Good Earth was an Oprah's Book Club choice in 2004. A readers' favorite for generations, this powerful and beautifully written fable resonates with universal themes of hope and family unity.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author's est… (more)

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1930s (4)
Asia (19)
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» See also 667 mentions

English (244)  Spanish (5)  German (4)  Finnish (2)  Italian (1)  Dutch (1)  Portuguese (Brazil) (1)  Danish (1)  All languages (259)
Showing 1-5 of 244 (next | show all)
This is the story of a poor farmer who married a slave girl. Buck was the daughter of missionaries in the late 1890s through the early 1900s, and so I don’t doubt she describes the average life of a poor man in China, and the role of women. Perhaps it is so striking to know that the book may accurately describe the treatment of women then. The farmer, a hard worker with immense love of the earth, becomes prosperous thanks to his wife’s stoic selfless sacrifices she makes to work the fields beside her husband up to the moments of giving birth. She was endlessly giving of herself. But the farmer only belatedly learned her value only after breaking her heart for years. I was hoping this was a story of love and sacrifice, but it became a story of what happens when a hardworking-successful man cares more about what others think than the one who saved him in the first place. ( )
  KarenMonsen | Sep 18, 2023 |
Like poetry ( )
  schoenbc70 | Sep 2, 2023 |
The Good Earth Trilogy Book 1 of 3, a classic Chinese fable, originally published in 1931.

This novel shows lessons in life of what becomes of hardworkers and what becomes of idleness. It also shows the complications and problems that come along with the riches when you lose and forget your roots of where you came from. The author who had lived the first 40 years of her life in China before returning to the States to live near her daughter, was actually banned from China in 1979, a year before her death, from ever returning to China because of this book. They didn't appreciate the light she cast on their poor peasant farmers and on little girls in front of the world. But, inspite of being banned, she was still considered a friend of the Chinese.

As Wang Lung moves up in class structure, from becoming a poor, hard-working peasant farmer who loves and honors the land that feeds him and his family, to a very wealthy landowner who rents out his land to other poor peasant farmers, he gets all caught up in the rich man's sins and wastefulness in life, bringing in a multitude of anxiety and complications into his life.

You begin to see from Wang's father, to his sons, how the more each generation is removed from its dependency on the earth and are able to spend more time in wasteful idleness, to now having plenty of money and plenty of food provided by the hard work due to the father, how life can begin to unravel. It is greed of instant money and not understanding that life, and even survival in hard times, comes from the earth, and from hard work, not in silver or gold coins, that will eventually send it all spiralling down. You can see how if he had kept life simple, with clean good living, the family may not have had all the problems upon them.

His sons just didn't appreciate the land like their father, and the last scene left you hanging to read the next book. The richest man in town now, Wang, old and dying, returns to his old homestead to die. The two oldest sons were standing in their fathers field talking about how to divide the sell of their family's original piece of land when their father walks up behind them and over hears this conversation. He begins to cry and hollar that the land is the only way to survive. To calm him the sons both start saying, Oh we aren't going to sell the land, Father. Don't worry! We aren't going to sell...yet smiling behind his back....Part 2, "Sons".
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MOVIE: "The Good Earth" came out in 1937, starring Louise Rainer as O-Lan and Paul Muni as Wang Lung. ( )
  MissysBookshelf | Aug 27, 2023 |
No review - read too long ago to recall. ( )
  mykl-s | Aug 12, 2023 |
One of the many that was left unread on The Modern Library list. A story of a man and his family, and their village life, in the first part of the 20th century in China. Told in a simple, straight forward, almost biblical sounding way. The characters don't speak much. Story elements address social class and family conflict. Won every award there was in the 1930's. I don't think I've seen the movie. ( )
  markm2315 | Jul 1, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 244 (next | show all)

» Add other authors (57 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Buck, Pearl S.primary authorall editionsconfirmed
DAMIANO, AndreaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Heald, AnthonyNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Kortemeier, S.Cover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Malling, LivTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Mendes, OscarTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Mulder de Dauner, ElisabethTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Simon, ErnstTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Zody, BepTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
...This was what Vinteuil had done for the little phrase. Swann felt that the composer had been content (with the instruments at his disposal) to draw aside its veil, to make it visible, following and respecting its outlines with a hand so loving, so prudent, so delicate and so sure, that the sound altered at every moment, blunting itself to indicate a shadow, springing back into life when it must follow the curve of some more bold projection. And one proof that Swann was not mistaken when believed in the real existence of this phrase was that anyone with an ear at all delicate for music would have at once detected the imposture had Vinteuil, endowed with less power to see and to render its forms, sought to dissemble (by adding a line, here and there, of his own invention) the dimness of his vision or the feebleness of his hand.
— Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust
Dedication
First words
It was Wang Lung's marriage day.
Quotations
He had no articulate thought of anything; there was only this perfect sympathy of movement, of turning this earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods. The earth lay rich and dark, and fell apart lightly under the points of their hoes, Sometimes they turned up a bit of brick, a splinter of wood. It was nothing. Sometimes, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. So would also their house, sometime, return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth. They worked on, moving together — together — producing the fruit of this earth — speechless in their movement together.
…he said nothing still, she looked at him piteously and sadly out of her strange dumb eyes that were like a beast’s eyes that cannot speak, and then she went away, creeping and feeling for the door because of her tears that blinded her.

Wang Lung watched her as she went and he was glad to be alone, but still he was ashamed and he was still angry that he was ashamed, and he said to himself, and he muttered the words aloud and restlessly, as though he quarreled with someone, “Well, and other men are so and I have been good enough to her, and there are men worse than I.” And he said at last that O-lan must bear it.
My house and my land it is, and if it were not for the land we should all starve as the others did, and you could not walk about in your dainty robes idle as a scholar. It is the good land that has made you something better than a farmer’s lad.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
This is the book; do not combine with the film.
Film ISBNs: 0792803825, 0790793083
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Canonical DDC/MDS
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Wikipedia in English (1)

Classic Literature. Fiction. HTML:

The Pulitzer Prizeâ??winning, New York Timesâ??bestselling novel about a peasant farmer and his family in early twentieth-century China.
The Good Earth is Buck's classic story of Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant farmer, and his wife, O-lan, a former slave. With luck and hard work, the couple's fortunes improve over the years: They have sons, and save steadily until one day they can afford to buy property in the House of Wangâ??the very house in which O-lan used to work. But success brings with it a new set of problems. Wang soon finds himself the target of jealousy, and as good harvests come and go, so does the social order. Will Wang's family cherish the estate after he's gone? And can his material success, the bedrock of his life, guarantee anything about his soul?

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Award, The Good Earth was an Oprah's Book Club choice in 2004. A readers' favorite for generations, this powerful and beautifully written fable resonates with universal themes of hope and family unity.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author's est

No library descriptions found.

Book description
La buona terra, che viene universalmente considerato il capolavoro della Buck, ripropone, con I'ingegno coerente e I'umana solidarietà proprie di questa scrittrice, il tema della vita patriarcale - legata alla terra e a tradizioni millenarie - del contadino cinese. Rifuggendo da artificiosi esotismi, l'opera, che rivela una profonda conoscenza della Cina così com'era agli inizi del secolo, narra la vicenda di Wang Lung a di sua moglie O-Lan, dell'eroica lotta che essi conducono contro la siccità, le devastazioni, l'avidità e il disamore dei figli per il lavoro dei campi. La terra significava per il contadino cinese il benessere, l'unione della famiglia, le tradizioni più sacre che da essa provenivano e ad esse erano legate, le virtù delle generazioni passate, le speranze di quelle future. Ormai vecchio Wang Lung così ammonisce i suoi figli: « Quando si comincia a vendere la terra è la fine di una famiglia. Dalla terra siamo venuti, e alla terra dobbiamo tornare... Se conserverete la terra vivrete... Nessuno potrà mai portarvela via... ».
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