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    A Study Guide for Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth
    A Study Guide for Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth
    A Study Guide for Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth
    Ebook46 pages35 minutes

    A Study Guide for Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 14, 2015
    ISBN9781535836951
    A Study Guide for Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth - Gale

      1

      The Good Earth

      Pearl S. Buck

      1931

      Introduction

      Pearl Buck was one of the most widely read American novelists of the twentieth century. When she published her most popular and critically acclaimed novel, The Good Earth, in 1931, she was living in China as the wife of a Christian missionary. By that time, she had lived in China for about forty years and brought to her portrayal of Chinese rural life a knowledge that few if any Western writers have possessed.

      The novel is about a poor farmer named Wang Lung who rises from humble origins to become a rich landowner with a large family. Although Wang Lung is a fundamentally decent man, as he becomes wealthy and acquires a large townhouse he becomes arrogant and loses his moral bearings, but he manages to right himself by returning to the land, which always nourishes his spirit.

      The Good Earth contains a wealth of detail about daily life in rural China at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first quarter of the twentieth century; it shows what people ate, what clothes they wore, how they worked, what gods they worshiped, and what their marriage and family customs were. The novel is written in a simple but elevated, almost Biblical style, which lends dignity to the characters and events. It was widely praised for presenting American readers with an accurate picture of a country about which they knew very little in the 1930s. As of 2006, The Good Earth had never been out of print and had sold millions of copies in many different languages.

      Author Biography

      One of most popular American authors of the mid-twentieth century, Pearl Buck was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Her parents, who were Christian missionaries, took her to China when she was three months old. Spending her childhood in Chinkiang, China, Buck was able to read Chinese as well as English literature when she was only seven years old. When she was eight, her family was endangered by the Boxer Uprising of 1900, which targeted Western missionaries for killing.

      After attending a boarding school in Shanghai, Buck returned with her family to the United States, and in 1910, she enrolled at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, in Lynchburg, Virginia.

      She graduated in 1914, and she soon returned to China, marrying John Lossing Buck, an American agricultural specialist. The couple lived in a village in North China. In 1924, Buck taught English literature at the University of Nanking. The following year, she returned to the United States and enrolled at Cornell University, from which she received an M.A. in 1926. After returning to China in 1927, Buck and her husband found themselves caught up in revolutionary violence in Nanking. A mob looted their house as they lay in hiding in a tiny room in a nearby house.

      During the 1920s, Buck developed her writing craft, publishing stories and essays in magazines. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind was published in 1930. It was followed by The Good Earth in 1931, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1935. The novel, which

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