Spending her childhood in Chinkiang, China, Buck was able to read Chinese as well as English literature when she was only seven years old.
Her parents, who were Christian missionaries, took her to China when she was three months old. One of most popular American authors of the mid-twentieth century, Pearl Buck was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. As of 2006, The Good Earth had never been out of print and had sold millions of copies in many different languages. It was widely praised for presenting American readers with an accurate picture of a country about which they knew very little in the 1930s. The novel is written in a simple but elevated, almost Biblical style, which lends dignity to the characters and events. The Good Earth contains a wealth of detail about daily life in rural China at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first quarter of the twentieth century it shows what people ate, what clothes they wore, how they worked, what gods they worshiped, and what their marriage and family customs were. Although Wang Lung is a fundamentally decent man, as he becomes wealthy and acquires a large townhouse he becomes arrogant and loses his moral bearings, but he manages to right himself by returning to the land, which always nourishes his spirit.
The novel is about a poor farmer named Wang Lung who rises from humble origins to become a rich landowner with a large family. By that time, she had lived in China for about forty years and brought to her portrayal of Chinese rural life a knowledge that few if any Western writers have possessed. When she published her most popular and critically acclaimed novel, The Good Earth, in 1931, she was living in China as the wife of a Christian missionary. Pearl Buck was one of the most widely read American novelists of the twentieth century.
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