She had a square, honest face, a short, broad nose with large black nostrils, and her mouth was wide as a gash in her face. He has never meet his betrothed, O-lan, who is a slave at the House of Wwang (a family of rich landowners), but he is excited to have finally taken a wife. The book opens on Wang Lung’s wedding day.
Set in the period before the Revolution, it depicts China under the reign of its last emperor and presents a fascinating glimpse of rural life, where famine, flood and locust plagues are never far away. The story, which spans some 50 years, is a relatively simple one about a poor peasant farmer, Wang Lung, who works hard to become a wealthy landowner. (Buck later received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938 - “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces” - the first American woman to do so.) First published in 1931, it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932 and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1935. The Good Earth is the first in an “oriental trilogy” written by American-born Pearl S. Fiction – paperback Simon & Schuster Ltd – Washington Square Press 368 pages 2004.
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