Before the Communists . . . before its emergence as the World's Largest Market . . . China was an overwhelmingly rural, farming society whose citizens had only the vaguest sense of what was going on in the big cities. Pearl Buck, a Westerner born and raised in China, uses the story of Wang Lung and his wide O-lan to show what life in the rural villages of China was like a century or so ago.

Sending to bookshop for his classroom

I hate to think that this novel was headed into obscurity if it hadn't been for Oprah. It's too good to forget.