Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [154]
When they returned to China, the country was gripped by spreading civil war. Sun Yat-sen had died in the spring of 1925. Chiang Kai-shek had emerged as Sun's successor, but he was savagely opposed throughout much of the country by warlords and Communists. It was one of the most chaotic periods in Chinese history.
In March 1927, the battles reached Nanking. The vice president of the university was killed, and the Buck family spent an entire day hiding in a windowless hut while their house was looted. If they had been discovered, they would almost surely have been killed. They fled to Shanghai on an American gunboat, then moved to Japan, where they lived most of the following year.
Pearl Buck began to rebuild her life, redefining her relationship with her daughter, her husband, and her work. She had found that she could not provide Carol the constant care she needed, so she traveled to the U.S. and installed her daughter in the Vineland Training Center in New Jersey. Pearl had also concluded that her marriage could not be salvaged. Though she did not file for divorce until 1935, she had told Lossing Buck that she intended to leave him several years before that.
Finally, Pearl Buck dedicated herself to her writing. In the first half of the 1920s, she had published a couple of stories and essays, but she now worked diligently on a novel. She wanted to earn enough money to pay for Carol's care, and she also wanted to have her own identity, apart from her husband and the missionary community. In 1930, her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published by the John Day Company, a small firm in New York. Buck's literary career was under way. Within a few months, her father, Absalom, died, thus cutting another link that bound her to the past, to China, and to the missionary enterprise. Buck now decided that she would move permanently back to the United States with Janice. She wanted to be closer to her daughter Carol, and further away from Lossing.
THE GOOD EARTH was Pearl Buck's second book. A main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, it was published on March 2, 1931. Pearl Buck was still in China, so she left all the details of publicity and marketing to her publisher. In a flurry of letters in March and April, Buck learned of the reception The Good Earth was enjoying from readers and reviewers. Every leading newspaper and magazine gave the book a major notice, and almost all the reviews were ecstatic. Sales were so strong that the John Day Company had to borrow copies from the Book-of-the-Month Club inventory to meet bookstore demand. The Good Earth would eventually prove to be the best-selling book of both 1931 and 1932.
Since Buck was unknown and virtually out of reach in Nanking, John Day's publicity department had little material to work with. "It is a curious feeling," John Day's publisher, Richard Welsh, said in one of his many letters, "writing to you at so great a distance about these matters. We sit here in a genuine whirl of excitement about the book which you have written and you the author are completely detached from it."[4] Buck turned back Welsh's pleas for detailed biographical information, taking the lofty (and allegedly "Chinese") position that the work was more important than the author. More pertinent, she wanted to protect her own privacy and conceal Carol's condition from the public's remorseless curiosity. Carol's illness also subtracted from the happiness Buck enjoyed in her accomplishment.
THE BOOK that changed Pearl Buck's life forever was at once innovative and familiar, groundbreaking in its subject matter but thoroughly