The great and lasting popularity of The Good Earth can be attributed to the simple humanity of the people who come to life in its pages. Written in 1930, this novel brought Pearl S. Buck to the admiring attention of the world and was influential, eighteen years later, in earning for her the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was the first and only American woman so to be honored. Author of many books since The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck is almost always identified with and remembered by this epic of the soil. It is a novel that has taken root and has grown in strength with the passage of the years. Far more than a portrayal of Oriental life. The Good Earth is the ever-heroic story of man's struggle for existence in any age and in any part of the world.