In The Good Earth, Pearl Buck tells a timeless story about a farmer struggling to eke out a living from the earth. Hardworking and wildly ambitious, Wang Lung and his wife, O-lan, pull themselves out of poverty, bring children into the world, survive famines and floods, and toil relentlessly to build a fortune without ever losing faith in the restorative power of the land. But their work is not the novel’s only story. Marriages and conniving family members, natural disasters and wars, births and adolescent rebellions, concubines and opium addiction make The Good Earth a rich and dramatic tapestry of life in early-twentieth-century China.