Nostalgia for Pearl Buck's ‘the good earth’∗

Abstract

Until the Chinese peasants made their revolution in 1949 they were known to the Western world almost exclusively as the product of Pearl Buck's (1892–1973) prose. The influence of The Good Earth was even more widespread than that of Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China. We are only now beginning to understand the peculiarities of that influence and the fictitious half‐world in which China's peasants were placed. Rural reality is only recently beginning to cut away at the historical fiction that has governed much of our thinking about China. In this little reminiscence, Imabori Seiji, himself once seduced by the humanitarian fantasies of The Good Earth, recalls how he first began the search for real peasants out there in the villages of north China. [H. L. Kahn]