The Good Earth

VERY GOOD condition — BOARDS: Tear across top portion of spine from side to side; chipping to area above same, and the crown. Small half inch tear to spine, just above foot; minor discoloration to same. Faint stain to top of front board just below edge, approx. 1½ x 1½ inch. Minor stain to upper right corner, back. Minor scuffs to all outside corners. BOOK: Faint staining to textblock head. Very faint bleedthrough of textblock staining to top edge of pages, corresponding to width of stain. Ink markings to half-title and title pages. Please inspect photos and description closely for condition details.

Here on offer is a very nice copy of Pearl S. Buck's Pulitzer-Prize winning book, The Good Earth, the first novel in Buck's House of Earth trilogy. This copy is a 1st trade edition, 1st printing of the work published by John Day Publishing Company in 1931. There is no dust jacket, but the boards are protected from further wear by a custom vinyl sleeve.

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"Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck's epic Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Oprah Book Club selection about a vanished China and one family's shifting fortunes.

Though more than seventy years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. In The Good Earth Pearl S. Buck paints an indelible portrait of China in the 1920s, when the last emperor reigned and the vast political and social upheavals of the twentieth century were but distant rumblings. This moving, classic story of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his selfless wife O-Lan is must reading for those who would fully appreciate the sweeping changes that have occurred in the lives of the Chinese people during the last century.

Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life: its terrors, its passions, its ambitions and rewards. Her brilliant novel—beloved by millions of readers—is a universal tale of an ordinary family caught in the tide of history."

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Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973) was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.

Buck was born in West Virginia, but in October 1892, her parents took their 4-month-old baby to China. As the daughter of missionaries and later as a missionary herself, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, with her parents, and in Nanjing, with her first husband. She and her parents spent their summers in a villa in Kuling, Mount Lu, Jiujiang, and it was during this annual pilgrimage that the young girl decided to become a writer. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, then returned to China. From 1914 to 1932, after marrying John Lossing Buck, she served as a Presbyterian missionary, but she came to doubt the need for foreign missions. Her views became controversial during the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, leading to her resignation. After returning to the United States in 1935, she married the publisher Richard J. Walsh and continued writing prolifically. She became an activist and prominent advocate of the rights of women and racial equality, and wrote widely on Chinese and Asian cultures, becoming particularly well known for her efforts on behalf of Asian and mixed-race adoption.

The above text was taken from, respectively, Washington Square Press (via Google Books) and Wikipedia.