#122 in Classics
The Good Earth
- 316
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
- Pulitzer Prize for the Novel
- Oprah's Book Club
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Our view
“The Good Earth” follows a Chinese farmer and his family with a plain, patient realism that still holds a reader after nearly a century. Pearl S. Buck, who grew up in China, writes from close observation of village life, in a restrained, almost factual voice. Some readers find that tone distant and the language dated in ways that jar today, yet are moved by the family’s fate. It is the first volume of a trilogy.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Good Earth is a historical fiction novel by Pearl S. Buck published in 1931 that dramatizes family life in an early 20th-century Chinese village in Anhwei. It is the first book in her House of Earth trilogy, continued in 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 American missionaries, wrote the book while living in China and drew on her first-hand observation of Chinese village life. The realistic and sympathetic depiction of the farmer Wang Lung and his wife O-Lan helped prepare Americans of the 1930s to consider Chinese as allies in the coming war with Japan.
Reading order · House of Earth
Full order & progress →- The Good EarthThis book
7.97.9 / 10 - SonsSons–Not ranked yet
- A House DividedA House Divided–Not ranked yet
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.7 across 305 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 67% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Classics average of 7.7. That is how 7.9 comes out. A further +0.10 comes from the small bonus for major awards.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.8 | 24 | 8% |
| Hardcover | 7.7 | 281 | 92% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Good Earth?
It has 316 pages — shorter than 81% of the ranked books in Classics.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Classics — with scores between 7.8 and 8.0, closest to this book.
