![]() ![]() In 2004, however, American readers flocked back to the novel after Oprah Winfrey selected it as a title for her popular book club. As Jonathan Spence notes in his New York Review of Books article on Pearl Buck: Journey to the Good Earth, even sympathetic biographer Hilary Spurling cannot help but describe Buck’s plot choices as “preposterous” at times.Īfter the Communist victory over mainland China in 1949, which received crucial support from the country's vast rural hinterland, The Good Earth, which had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932, fell out of fashion in the McCarthy-era United States for its association with revolutionary peasants. While many early readers hailed her work for its realistic descriptions of life in the Chinese countryside, critics derided The Good Earth as saccharine and simplistic. This is not, I trust, a controversial statement: Pearl Buck’s 1931 novel suffered a mixed reputation from the start. ![]() The Good Earth simultaneously manages to be both a classic and not very good. ![]()
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