THE GOOD EARTH : COMPLETE & UNABRIDGED (Readers's Enrichment Series RE-302)

New York, NY: Washington Square Press, 1963. First Edition, First Printing . Paperback. Very Good/None as Issued. Text/VG, unread w/margin discoloration & trace humidity stains to lower corner of front pages. Illustrated softcover/VG; sound w/rubs to front. Published w/o ISBN; ISBN assigned subsequently. 1931, 2nd novel, winner of the 1932 Pulitzer, translated to some 30 languages, made into a Broadway play and adapted to film, from Pearl S. Buck (1892 - 1933) , who, a child of missionaries, grew up in China. An initimate & movinging account of how a poor Anhwrei Chinese peasant farmer Wang Lung improves his standing. Set in time after the fall of the Ching Dynasty, the 1911 establishment of the Republic of China and pre-World War I, when dazzling visions of railroad construction & modernization held sway. Wang Lung, whose children begs on the streetss as he pulls a rickshaw, does rise in social stature to have servants and concubines. In the sequels, Sons and The House Divided, Wang's offspring fair poorly as China faces disintegration of the imperial past and lured by utopias promised by theorists of Democracy and Marxist Communism. Years of invasion by missionaries, gunboats and being carved into international territorial concessions (i.e. HongKong, Macau, Tsingtao for German beer) left China and the Wang family saga on its knees. Strong copy despite flaws.