Customers who bought this product also bought:

	Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (Paperback) (Paperback) by Jung Chang The history of twentieth-century China is told through the lives of three women - a story of tragedy, perseverance, love, devotion, kindness, stupidity, insecurity, fear. A wonderful gift to the entire human race.
	Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter (Paperback) by Adeline Yen Mah A compelling, painful, and ultimately triumphant story of a girl's journey into adulthood. Adeline's story is a testament to the most basic of human needs: acceptance, love, and understanding.
	The Rise of A Hungry Nation: China Shakes The World (Hardcover) by James Kynge This is a great book about China and it's impact on the rest of the world - both positive and negative.
	The Search for Modern China (Paperback) by Jonathan D. Spence An all encompassing and matchless history of modern China, this monumental masterpiece is the best place to start to understand China's past.

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Her parents were Southern Presbyterian missionaries, most often stationed in China, and from childhood, Pearl spoke both English and Chinese. She returned to China shortly after graduation from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1914, and the following year, she met a young agricultural economist named John Lossing Buck. They married in 1917, and immediately moved to Nanhsuchou in rural Anhwei province. In this impoverished community, Pearl Buck gathered the material that she would later use in The Good Earth and other stories of China.

Pearl began to publish stories and essays in the 1920s, in magazines such as The Nation, The Chinese Recorder, Asia, and The Atlantic Monthly. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published by the John Day Company in 1930. John Day's publisher, Richard Walsh, would eventually become Pearl's second husband, in 1935, after both received divorces.

In 1931, John Day published Pearl's second novel, The Good Earth. This became the bestselling book of both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal in 1935, and would be adapted as a major MGM film in 1937. Other novels and books of nonfiction quickly followed. In 1938, less than a decade after her first book had appeared, Pearl won the Nobel Prize in literature, the first American woman to do so. By the time of her death in 1973, Pearl had published more than seventy books: novels, collections of stories, biography and autobiography, poetry, drama, children's literature, and translations from the Chinese. She is buried at Green Hills Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

From the publisher

The book follows the story of Wang Lung, a peasant farmer who we first see on the opening page of the book, walking to the house of the great and powerful Hwang family to buy his wife, O-lan. The contrast between simple Wang Lung, a hard-working man of the earth who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty and is respectful, frugal, prudent and temperate, and the powerful yet debauched and decadent Hwang family, is one of the most powerful themes of the book: as the Hwangs' fortunes fall, Wang Lung's increase, until by the end of the book Wang Lung's family has moved into the estate left vacant by the impoverished Hwangs. On the one hand, this is a "Horatio Alger" story in that through hard work, moderation and responsibility coupled with a bit of luck, Wang is able to go "from rags to riches." However, at the same time this tale also illustrates the saying "shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations," for as Wang and his family rise in wealth and status, at the same time they assume many of the decadent habits of the fallen Hwangs - and most importantly, they lose their fundamental connection to the land from which their wealth has come. Although Wang struggles to instill his values of hard work and prudence in his sons, and though his fondest dream is to see his sons continue to work the land that was his family's (and in which his father, his first wife, and his faithful steward are buried and into which he himself hopes to be laid to rest) it is clear that his sons have fully assimilated to the culture of the upper class and have no respect for the humble occupation of farmer: his oldest son is a social climber who is acutely aware of his lower-class origins and desperate to distance himself from them as much as possible, while his second son is a shrewd and calculating merchant who thinks in terms of money, not romantic attachments to the earth, and would not be out of place at the head of one of Wall Street's Fortune 500 companies. Wang's third son, meanwhile, bitter and resentful at the fact that his father has decided arbitrarily that he will be the son who stays on the farm (this was not done out of cruelty, for Wang genuinely believes that the trade of farmer is the most satisfying trade there is), runs away to join the army, never to return.

Not only are his sons corrupted by wealth and power, but Wang himself for all his honest values, also succumbs to the temptations presented by elite status. This is manifested most overtly in his decision to abandon O-lan, his faithful and uncomplaining wife on whom most of his success was built, for the delicate and enticing courtesan Lotus, but can also be seen in the way he subtly comes to think and act superior to the townsfolk (this is clearly demonstrated by his treatment of Ching, a man who shared with Wang his last handful of beans at a time when both families were poor and starving, and whom Wang repays when his own fortunes slightly improve by making Ching his steward), and also in Wang's increasing separation from the land as his fortunes rise and he can afford to (and does) hire laborers to work the land for him.

It is also clear that Wang's increasing fortunes bring him no rest, because as he accumulates more power and wealth, vicious and entrenched rivalries break out among his sons and their wives (Buck repeats the phrase "there was no peace in his house" several times) and it is not hard to see that these rivalries will split the family in the next generation. In fact, as Wang grows old and feeble at the end of his life, he chooses to move away from the rivalries and tensions of the great house and back into the simple structure he occupied in his younger days; he lives there with only a young serving girl and his "poor fool" retarded daughter for company. It is only here, back at his roots, that Wang is at last able to find peace. The final scene of the book, however, makes it clear that Wang's hard work and dreams will not last beyond his death, as his sons talk openly of selling their family land over the head of their senile father. Just as the Hwangs before them fell, the family of Wang Lung too will fall.