Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [0]
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The End
Pearl S. Buck's
The House of Earth Trilogy Book One
THE GOOD EARTH
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Introduction
Pearl Buck and the Good Earth
FROM THE DAY of its publication in 1931, The Good Earth has been one of the most popular novels of the twentieth century. Sales figures and prizes tell part of the story. Several million copies of the book have been sold in more than sixty countries, including the United States. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells medal for fiction. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer paid the then-record sum of $50,000 for movie rights. The film version of the novel, released in 1937, was seen by over twenty million people around the world. One of the movie's stars, Luise Rainer, won an Academy Award for best actress.
The influence of The Good Earth has perhaps proven even more remarkable than its popularity. For at least thirty years, well into the 1960s, Pearl Buck's novel played a greater role in shaping Western attitudes toward China than any other book. In The Good Earth, for the first time, American and European readers encountered Chinese characters who thought and behaved like ordinary, believable human beings rather than cartoon "Orientals."
This is the main achievement of Buck's novel, and the source of its lasting significance. Prior to The Good Earth, Westerners had reduced Asian people to a cluster of simplified stereotypes, most of them insulting: the Chinese were dishonest, cruel, inscrutable; they were addicted to opium and delighted in torture; their society was backward and decadent.
These vulgar but durable clichés were rooted in the fertile soil of Western ignorance. In 1931, when The Good Earth appeared, Americans knew almost nothing about China. Only a handful of merchants, diplomats, and missionaries had set foot in China or in any Asian country. In the absence of accurate knowledge, Americans replaced Chinese reality with stick figures of vice and immorality, transforming Asians into caricatures like the villainous Fu Manchu and Bret Harte's comic "Heathen Chinee."
Pearl Buck restored humanity to her Chinese subjects. The main characters in The Good Earth---the farmer, Wang Lung, and his wife, O-lan---share the experiences, the desires, and the fears of men and women in any rural community. While they are convincingly Chinese, there is nothing mysterious or exotic about them. In addition, The Good Earth provides a valuable record of life in the Chinese countryside in the early years of this century. Professor Liu Haiping, dean of the school of foreign languages at Nanjing University, has called the novel, and Buck's many other stories about China, a "treasure trove" of Chinese history.
THE GOOD EARTH
"...THIS WAS what Vinteuil had done for the little phrase. Swann felt that the composer had been content (with the instruments at his disposal) to draw aside its veil, to make it visible, following and respecting its outlines with a hand so loving, so prudent, so delicate and so sure, that the sound altered at every moment, blunting itself to indicate a shadow, springing back into life when it must follow the curve of some more bold projection. And one proof that Swann was not mistaken when he believed in the real existence of this phrase was that anyone with an ear at all delicate for music would have at once detected the imposture had Vinteuil, endowed with less power to see and to render its form, sought to dissemble (by adding a line, here and there, of his own invention) the dimness of his vision or the feebleness of his