The Good Earth (Graphic Adaptation)

Pearl S. Buck’s Pulitzer Prize–winning classic about the rise and fall of Chinese villagers before World War I comes to life in this evocative graphic novel by New York Times bestselling author Nick Bertozzi.

Although more than eighty years have passed since Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. This indelible portrait of China in the 1920s, when the last emperor reigned and the vast political and social upheavals of the twentieth century were but distant rumblings, tells the moving story of honest farmer Wang Lung and his selfless wife O-Lan. It is must reading to fully appreciate the sweeping changes that have occurred in the lives of the Chinese people during the last century.

Displaying his Eisner Award–winning talents, New York Times bestselling author Nick Bertozzi brings Buck’s epic novel to life with incredible imagery in this “finely rendered showcase…that perfectly captures the story’s timeless subject matter while also underscoring the antiquity of the depicted world” (Kirkus Reviews). Bertozzi retraces the whole cycle of life depicted in Buck’s original novel: its terrors, its passions, its ambitions, and its rewards. Now The Good Earth—the universal tale of an ordinary family caught in the tide of history—offers a whole new dimension with these beautiful, evocative images.

Pearl S. Buck was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Pearl began to publish stories and essays in the 1920s, in magazines such as The Nation, The Chinese Recorder, Asia, and The Atlantic Monthly. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published by the John Day Company in 1930. In 1931, John Day published Pearl’s second novel, The Good Earth. This became the bestselling book of both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal in 1935, and would be adapted as a major MGM film in 1937. In 1938, less than a decade after her first book had appeared, Pearl won the Nobel Prize in literature, the first American woman to do so. By the time of her death in 1973, Pearl had published more than seventy books: novels, collections of stories, biography and autobiography, poetry, drama, children’s literature, and translations from the Chinese. She is buried at Green Hills Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Nick Bertozzi has written and drawn many comics over the years, including The Salon, Lewis & Clark, and the New York Times bestselling Shackleton: Antarctic Odyssey. He’s also written the upcoming Becoming Andy Warhol. Bertozzi has won multiple Harvey and Eisner awards, the highest honors in comics. He lives in Queens, New York, with his wife and daughters.