When O-lan a servant girl marries the peasant Wang Lung she toils tirelessly through four pregnancies for their family's survival Reward at first is meagre but there is sustenance in the land
- until the famine comes Half-starved the family joins thousands of peasants to beg on the city streets It seems that all is lost until O-lan's desperate will to survive returns them home with undreamt of wealth But they have betrayed the earth from which true wealth springs & the family's money breeds only mistrust deception
- & heartbreak for the woman who had saved them The Good Earthis a riveting family saga & story of female sacrifice
- a classic of twentieth-century literature