[Why was the response to Pearl Buck's early works so sweeping when they were so far from the literary vanguard?] Because they spoke to the poverty and uncertainty of the times. There hovered over them the certitudes of an inner-directed and Victorian spirit with a large and generous view of life, which could present values rather than seek them in a troubled world. In those Depression years The Good Earth's vivid and compassionate picture of the bare subsistence level of the Chinese masses fed the fires of protest against social injustice, while at the same time offering the satisfactions of a rags-to-riches tale. The rise of Wang Lung and his wife O-lan, by dogged thrift and industry, from starvation in a drought year to a position of wealth and the establishment of a family dynasty is a success story par excellence in which the underdog wins against all the odds of man and nature…. (pp. 90-1)
There were other aspects of The Good Earth and The Mother that must have been especially appealing to those times. To an East wracked by social revolution, and a West whose moral and economic fabric increasingly gave way, the strong, dignified, and uncomplex narratives of the immemorial Chinese peasant life, told with a simplicity that could be translated readily and understood anywhere, stressed the eternal verities of soil and season, of the fruit of the earth and the womb, the quintessential human facts of birth, love, laughter, sorrow, death. The Good Earth—how meaningful a title to all those dispossessed by want in cities. How comforting, in the midst of devastating material and spiritual flux, to glimpse stability, to be so convincingly reminded of life's perpetual self-renewal, the ever returning spring after winter in the changeless cycle of the earth's turning. It was the expression of a peculiarly Eastern view, its symbol the cycle, the circle, its source in conceptions of karma and reincarnation. Certainly the cyclic form appears over and over in Pearl Buck's novels of the thirties. (pp. 90-1)
