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Encyclopedia entry: Good Earth, The
- Article from:
- The Oxford Companion to American Literature
- Author:
Copyright© The Oxford Companion to American Literature 1995, originally published by Oxford University Press 1995. (Hide copyright information)
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Good Earth, The,
novel by
Pearl Buck
, published in 1931, awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and dramatized by Owen and Donald Davis (1932). With
Sons
(1932) and
A House Divided
(1935), it forms a trilogy,
The House of Earth.
Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant, rises to become a rich landowner and founder of a powerful family, but throughout his life he is dominated by a reverence for the soil. His marriage to O‐lan, formerly a kitchen slave in the House of Hwang, intensifies this feeling, for her starved youth has impressed upon her the lessons of careful husbandry and the security that comes only from possession of land. Slowly but surely, during strenuous years of hardship, famine, flood, ...