Novel: The Good Earth

Overview
Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth traces the rise and moral unraveling of Wang Lung, a poor farmer in pre-revolutionary China, whose fortunes swell and falter with his devotion to the land. Through his marriage to O-Lan, a former slave of the wealthy House of Hwang, and the generations that follow, the novel portrays the intimate link between soil, sustenance, and survival, as well as the corrosive temptations of wealth and status. Set against droughts, famine, social unrest, and shifting class hierarchies, it is both a family saga and a meditation on the costs of upward mobility.

Early Struggle and the Bond to the Land
Wang Lung begins with almost nothing but a small plot, a stubborn work ethic, and O-Lan’s steady, wordless strength. She bears children, labors beside him in the fields, and manages the household with thrift that borders on austerity. Good harvests allow them to buy parcels of land from the declining House of Hwang, transforming fear of hunger into cautious hope. The earth seems a benevolent force: when tended with sweat and humility, it yields dignity as well as grain.

Famine, Flight, and Fortune
A catastrophic drought breaks that fragile security. With crops dead and stores empty, the family joins a desperate migration south, eking out life in a city through begging, hauling rickshaws, and odd labor. When a riot erupts and a great house is looted, O-Lan quietly seizes a pouch of jewels. She says little, but the treasure becomes the hinge of their fate. Returning to their village once rains resume, Wang Lung buys more fields, retools his farm, and expands steadily. Land accumulation becomes both lifeline and obsession, and the family’s poverty recedes into a memory he cannot fully bear to remember.

Wealth, Pride, and Fracture
Prosperity carries a new danger: distance from the soil. Wang Lung hires laborers, moves into the former Hwang estate, and grows susceptible to luxury. He takes a concubine, Lotus, whose silken refinement humiliates O-Lan, and he even wrests from O-Lan the two pearls she had kept back from the jewel hoard to adorn Lotus. His parasitic uncle and aunt, tied to local bandits, insinuate themselves into his household; Wang Lung buys their compliance with opium and money rather than confront their menace. The family’s moral fiber frays as quickly as its fortunes bloom, and the house fills with intrigues, jealousies, and the stale air of idleness.

Children and Generational Drift
The eldest son aspires to gentility and urban polish; the second son is canny, tight-fisted, and practical; the third runs off to become a soldier. Their differences harden into rivalries that money cannot soothe. A beloved but simple-minded daughter, “the poor fool,” remains under O-Lan’s protective gaze and later under the care of a young maid, Pear Blossom, whom the aging Wang Lung takes as a last concubine. Education, commerce, and military life pull the next generation away from the rhythms of planting and harvest, away from the land that formed them.

Loss, Reckoning, and the Land’s Last Claim
O-Lan’s long illness and death strip Wang Lung of his shield against his own vanity and restlessness. In moments of clarity he returns to the fields, finding in the furrows the steadiness that eludes him in the great house. He survives a locust plague with his laborers, faces political rumblings at the edges of his holdings, and grows old watching his sons treat acreage as capital rather than inheritance. He pleads that they never sell the land. They promise, yet exchange a covert glance over their father’s bowed head, signaling a future where the earth may be broken not by plow but by sale. The novel closes on that uneasy pact, revealing how prosperity can sever the very root that nourished it. Through Wang Lung’s arc, Buck binds family fate to the soil itself, suggesting that the land sustains those who honor it, and consumes those who forget.