The Red Book Club

Read, Eat and Drink!

Upcoming Events

Kim will be our host this month on the 27th, at 7pm. Our book selection is The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck.

Published in 1931, the novel about peasant life in China in the 1920's was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1932. The Good Earth follows the life of Wang Lung, from his beginnings as an impoverished peasant to his eventual position as a prosperous landowner. He is aided immeasurably by his equally humble wife, O-Lan, with whom he shares a devotion to the land, to duty, and to survival. Buck combines descriptions of marriage, parenthood, and complex human emotions with depictions of Chinese reverence for the land and for a specific way of life.

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) Was one of the most popular American authors of her day, humanitarian, crusader for women's rights, editor of Asia magazine, philanthropist, noted for her novels of life in China. Pearl S. Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.

During her career as an author, spanning forty years, Buck published eighty works, including novels, plays, short story collections, poems, children's books, and biographies. She also wrote five novels under the name John Sedges and translated Lo Guangzhong's (1330-1400) The Water Margin / Men of the Marshes, which appeared in 1933 under the title All Men Are Brothers. The book depicts adventures of outlaws and was banned by Sung rulers. COMMAND THE MORNING (1959) concerned the efforts of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb and the ethics of dropping it on Japan. THE CHINESE NOVEL (1939) was largely an explanation of her own writing style.