“The test of a civilization is in the way
that it cares for its helpless members ”
– Pearl S. Buck
. review : jotsna jari
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973), also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu, wgas an American writer and novelist. She is noted for her novels of life in China.
She is best known for The Good Earth
which was the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her “masterpieces”, two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.
The Good Earth, first edition, 1931
The Good Earth(1931) is a poignant tale of a Chinese peasant and his slave-wife and their struggle upward.
The Good Earth follows the life of Wang Lung from his beginnings as an impoverished peasant to his eventual position as a prosperous landowner. He is aided immeasurably by his equally humble wife, O-Lan, with whom he shares a devotion to the land, to duty, and to survival. Pearl S Buck combines descriptions of marriage, parenthood, and complex human emotions with depictions of Chinese reverence for the land and for a specific way of life.
This novel has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. In The Good Earth Pearl S. Buck paints an indelible portrait of China in the 1920s, when the last emperor reigned and the vast political and social upheavals of the twentieth century were but distant rumblings. This moving, classic story of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his selfless wife O-Lan is must reading for those who would fully appreciate the sweeping changes that have occurred in the lives of the Chinese people during the last century.
Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life: its terrors, its passions, its ambitions and rewards. Her brilliant novel—beloved by millions of readers—is a universal tale of an ordinary family caught in the tide of history.
💚 In her speech to the Nobel Academy, she took as her topic “The Chinese Novel.” She explained, “I am an American by birth and by ancestry”, but “my earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China.”
She also said : “To farmers he must talk of their land, and to old men he must speak of peace, and to old women he must tell of their children, and to young men and women he must speak of each other.” And like the Chinese novelist, she concluded, “I have been taught to want to write for these people. If they are reading their magazines by the million, then I want my stories there rather than in magazines read only by a few.”
Review :
“Boston Transcript” One need never have lived in China or know anything about the Chinese to understand it or respond to its appeal.
“Pittsburgh Post Gazette” One of the most important and revealing novels of our time.
“The New York Times” A comment upon the meaning and tragedy of life as it is lived in any age in any quarter of the globe.
Pearl S. Buck receives the Nobel Prize for Literature from King Gustav V of Sweden in the Stockholm Concert Hall in 1938
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