The Good Earth The Good Earth The Good Earth is a novel by Pearl S. Buck published in 1931 that dramatizes family life in a Chinese village in the early 20th century. It is the first book in a trilogy that includes "Sons" (1932) and "A House Divided" (1935). It was the best-selling novel in the United States in both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932, and was influential in Buck's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Buck, who grew up in China as the daughter of missionaries, wrote the book while living in China and
The Good Earth the time of the 1911 Revolution. Some scholars have seen "The Good Earth" as creating sympathy for China in the oncoming war with Japan. "If China had not captured the American imagination," said one "it might just have been possible to work out a more satisfactory Far Eastern policy," but such works as "The Good Earth", "infused with an understandable compassion for the suffering Chinese, did little to inform Americans about their limited options in Asia." The diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber, however, although he agrees that Americans grew enamored of heroic Chinese portrayed by writers such as Buck, concluded that