[The Good Earth illuminates the death of Confucian China.] Pearl Buck defends [the premise that China's vitality would continue to flow upward from the land]…. As the title of Mrs. Buck's novel suggests, land was the basic social and economic value in Wang's life. (pp. 3-4)

In the early part of the novel at least, Wang is the epitome of farmer virtue…. Yet it is impossible for his family really to prosper. (p. 4)

In the south where he flees [a famine,] it is the great commercial activity of the city, encouraged by the West, which is able to provide work for uprooted and miserable agricultural laborers such as himself. True, such an existence was marginal, and Wang Lung and his family would certainly have died slowly on the fringes of the urban mass, still unable to break out of their poverty, had it not been for an exterior...