[If The Good Earth] is not about America, it is "American" in the Pulitzer way. The Good Earth is the story of how Wang Lung rises from his lowly position as a poor farmer to lordship of a great house; how his rich sons are softened by the idleness to which they are bred; and how the house of Wang will sink back into the poverty from which it arose, now that the great principle of honest toil has been forsaken. Thus, despite its Chinese setting, The Good Earth is another ethical-moral American drama acted out against the relentless cycle of history which raises up one generation and causes the downfall of the next. (p. 90)

One can see why The Good Earth might have appealed to the Pulitzer jurors as it did to many other American readers in the early 1930's—before the effects of the depression went very deep or very far. There was, first of all, the escapism offered by the exotic setting of far-off China, the lavish descriptions of poverty and famine which doubtless made the hard times at home seem a minor, transitory affair. Moreover, those inclined to seek a moral for a troubled nation did not need to probe very far below the surface of Mrs. Buck's narrative. In the rise and fall of her Chinese dynasties, one could discern the recent pattern of events at home, and perhaps one could find a guide for the future. Weren't the poverty and suffering of the 1930's a result of the extravagance of the 1920's, when America had strayed from the rocky path along which Americans had traditionally traveled, abandoning the old virtues—thrift, hard work, sobriety? As the career of Wang shows, such conduct leads to softness and moral flabbiness, and then to poverty and to hunger. One need only renounce the easy life and the primrose path, take up the hoe and shovel, and moral strength would come again, and every man would be saved. (p. 91)

It is another interesting reflection of the times that instead of proclaiming that individualism leads to great wealth—as both Tarkington and Edna Ferber had—Mrs. Buck says, rather, that it leads to security and safety, not only for oneself but also for one's descendants. In this we have a clear presentiment of the next thematic phase of the Pulitzer novel. Another significant and somewhat more subtle difference between this prize book and some of the earlier ones is that it does not attempt to reconcile money-making and morality. (p. 92)

[In] spite of its consistency and good intentions, The Good Earth is a childishly simple book in which good and evil are neatly labeled. Mrs. Buck always stays outside her characters, judging them sympathetically, but at the same time from a superior and somewhat patronizing altitude. The book's unity of tone is a mark of its superiority over the typical Pulitzer novel, but the pompous style by which that unity is achieved is another of the book's serious limitations. Whatever is gained in smoothness and uniformity is lost by the author's inability to make real, to dramatize thought and feeling. Its "folk poetic" or "Biblical" rhythms give the narrative a kind of factitious authority for allowing mere statement to screen psychological abysses which the author is unable to bridge. At a crucial point in the narrative, for example, when Wang is about to quit his good life as a farmer and become an idle rich man, Mrs. Buck simply says: "Then Wang Lung took into his head to eat dainty foods…." Mrs. Buck tries to make a sentence do what a better novelist would need half a novel to accomplish. (pp. 92-3)