Forty years after her death, a long-lost Pearl Buck manuscript has been discovered and will be published in October by Open Road Integrated Media.
Eternal Wonder was apparently written shortly before Buck’s death in 1973. In December, the author’s family learned of the manuscript from someone in Texas. “After my mother died… Somebody… ran off with this thing…” said Edgar S. Walsh, Buck’s son.
The new book is the “coming-of-age story of Randolph Colfax, an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris and on a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea that will change his life forever–and ultimately, to love.” Jane Friedman, the chief executive of Open Road Integrated Media, describes it as “moving and a real page-turner.”
Sara Braun, an avid fan of Buck’s novels, commented, “I can’t believe a manuscript actually survived 40 years in a storage unit. I can’t wait to read it.”
“I was absolutely amazed that in the last year of her life,” said Walsh, “my mother was able to produce a finished literary work such as this.”
Buck’s works affected much of the American perception toward Asia during the mid-20th century. The Good Earth, which depicts Chinese farmers in the early twentieth century, won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize and was instrumental in Buck’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.
