The Good Earth

Description

When O-lan, a servant girl, marries the peasant Wang Lung, she toils tirelessly through four pregnancies for their family's survival. Reward at first is meagre, but there is sustenance in the land - until the famine comes. Half-starved, the family joins thousands of peasants to beg on the city streets. It seems that all is lost, until O-lan's desperate will to survive returns them home with undreamt of wealth. But they have betrayed the earth from which true wealth springs, and the family's money breeds only mistrust, deception - and heartbreak for the woman who had saved them. The Good Earthis a riveting family saga and story of female sacrifice - a classic of twentieth-century literature.

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth and, in 1938, became the first American woman ever awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.