The Good Earth

Wang Lung is a poor farmer whose marriage to O-lan, a former slave from a wealthy household, gives him a partner of unusual endurance and practical intelligence. Together they work the fields, raise children and slowly buy land from the declining House of Hwang. Famine eventually drives the family south to a crowded city, where survival depends on begging, labour and the upheaval of the rich by the desperate.

When Wang Lung returns home with enough money to rebuild, harvests and property transform him from tenant farmer into landowner. Prosperity also loosens the discipline that created it: he takes a concubine, neglects O-lan and watches his sons grow distant from the soil. The novel follows a family's ascent across the last Qing years and the early Republic while asking whether wealth can preserve the values formed in poverty.