The Good Earth (Oprah Edition)

Pearl S. Buck's epicPulitzer Prize-winning novel of a China that was-- now in a Contemporary Classicsedition. Though more than sixty years have passedsince this remarkable novel won the PulitzerPrize, it has retained its popularity and becomeone of the great modern classics. "I can onlywrite what I know, and I know nothing but China,having always lived there," wrote Pearl Buck. InThe Good Earthshe presents a graphicview of a China when the last emperor reignedand the vast political and social upheavals ofthe twentieth century were but distant rumblingsfor the ordinary people. This moving, classicstory of the honest farmer Wang Lung and hisselfless wife O-lan is must reading for thosewho would fully appreciate the sweeping changesthat have occurred in the lives of the Chinesepeople during this century.Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck traces thewhole cycle of life: its terrors, its passions,its ambitions and rewards. Her brilliant novel-- beloved by millions of readers -- is auniversal tale of the destiny of man.

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.