The Eternal Wonder

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This novel written by my mother, Pearl S. Buck, was one she had been creating in the years before her death at age eighty in Danby, Vermont, on March 6, 1973. Her personal affairs during the final years of her life were chaotic: She had become involved with individuals who targeted her fortune, estranging her from her family, friends, staff, and publishers. She was virtually bankrupt. Her seven adopted children, of whom I am one, did not have access to her property, and the handwritten manuscript and a typed copy of The Eternal Wonder were taken by someone and disappeared for forty years.

After her death my siblings and I mounted an effort to recover what was left of her literary and personal estate, and after a number of years, we were ultimately successful. I became Pearl Buck’s literary executor. However, before the family gained control of her estate, many items, such as her personal papers, letters, manuscripts, and property, vanished. The family was never informed of the existence of her last literary creation. In the years following her death the family recovered other items that had been taken. In 2007 the original manuscript of Pearl Buck’s most famous novel, The Good Earth, was recovered. It had been stolen and hidden by a former secretary at some point in the mid-1960s.

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