Found after missing for 40 years, Pearl S. Buck’s final novel evokes wonder

Written in 1973, then stolen and left in a storage locker for almost 40 years, the late novelist Pearl S. Buck’s newly unearthed final novel The Eternal Wonder traces the story of a young gifted man whose search for meaning and love takes him across the world.

It’s hard to imagine a China so remote in Western imagination that a single American writer could serve as one of the few popular translators of its culture. But that was a status Pearl S. Buck carried after her 1931 novel The Good Earth launched a prolific career that made her a global celebrity. She won a Pulitzer prize for the book, and a Nobel prize in 1938 for the body of her work.