Monday’s
(July 1, 2013) Houston Chronicle stunned me with the news that a lost
manuscript of one of my all-time favorite authors has surfaced. Then I got to
thinking that since Buck was such a prodigious writer, there just might be more!
The
title, The Eternal Wonder, was
written in Vermont and turned up – of all places – in a storage locker in Texas.
Buck’s son, Edgar Walsh, has no idea how it ended up there, but is now able to
confirm that it was indeed her last novel, written in her late 70s when she
knew she was dying of lung cancer. The disease eventually took her on March 6,
1973, in Danby, Vermont.
Most
folks around my age got to know her from The
Good Earth, required reading in high school Lit classes at the time. Then
there was some flap in the late 60s about it being “licentious” (huh?) and it
was probably pulled from school reading lists. But it was a profound, memorable
read that’s stayed with me over the years. The great novels tend to do that. A
couple of years ago I happened onto a 1945 first edition Portrait of a Marriage, a work I hadn’t even heard of, at an indie
book store where I was doing a signing. It’s now one of my special treasures.
Pearl
S. Buck was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Her
parents, Southern Presbyterian missionaries, moved to China when she was 3 months
old. She lived there most her life, until 1934. In 1930, she published her first novel, East
Wind, West Wind. Her next novel, The Good Earth, earned her a
Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American female Nobel
laureate.
As well
as a writing career, she launched the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which focused
on women’s and minority’s rights in both America and China, and the adoption of
mixed-race children.
Being the
preeminent American writer of Chinese village life did not wear well with The
Cultural Revolution. The new Communist leadership denounced her as an "American
cultural imperialist" and forbid her from returning to China as planned
with the Richard Nixon visit in 1972. Buck was heartbroken.
But I
for one will be eagerly awaiting The
Eternal Wonder which will be published by Open Road Media in both digital
and hard copy versions. The only blurb in the Chronicle reads: “(The story) follows a brilliant young man named
Randolph Colfax through his adolescence and education to a romance with a
beautiful Chinese girl and Paris and New York.”
Good
enough. I’ll buy it!
2 comments:
Did you see that the New Yorker magazine is publishing a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald this week that it rejected when it was first submitted in 1936?
Wow - now that I've discovered your most recent comment,I'm scrounging through my archives to see what else I've missed. I didn't know anyone was reading this stuff! No, I didn't catch the New Yorker article, but it figures. No critic or journalist wants to admit the value of anything before a generation or two of public approval.
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