AP News, August 7th, 2007
Book lovers marveled in June when a Philadelphia auction house stumbled upon the long-lost manuscript of the 1931 Pearl S. Buck classic "The Good Earth."
The daughter of Buck's longtime secretary said she had found the 400 typed papers in a suitcase in her cluttered basement. The auction house called the FBI.
But in the weeks since, joy over the discovery has been tempered by rival claims for the Pulitzer Prize-winning copy. No fewer than three parties _ Bucks' heirs and two foundations with links to her _ have asserted rights to it, making a court fight likely.
Buck's children announced Tuesday that they have forged an agreement with one of the foundations. The heirs will lend the manuscript to a foundation that operates out of their mother's Pennsylvania farm, while retaining ownership. An exhibit is planned later this year.
The children learned Monday, though, that her West Virginia birthplace will vie for the papers, based on a notarized "bill of sale" that Buck signed in 1970, three years before she died.
"I wrote that document on her dining room table in Bucks County, late one night. I took my typewriter in and typed it up," lawyer Robert Jacobson, 82, said Tuesday.
"We went out and found a notary public near her house, and he got out of bed and notarized it at 11 or 12 o'clock at night," Jacobson recalled.
The legal affidavit was signed and notarized on Oct. 15, 1970, and filed at the Pocahontas County Courthouse in West Virginia on March 21, 1973, two weeks after Buck died. In the document, Buck estimates the value of her collection of manuscripts at $650,000 to $1 million, although she calls them "priceless to me."
She lists scores of documents she was giving to the birthplace, including "'The Good Earth' manuscript, the exact location of which is unknown." Buck hoped the birthplace could leverage the papers to obtain matching funds to restore the historic birthplace in Hillsboro, Jacobson said.
Janet L. Mintzer, chief executive of Pearl S. Buck International, said the West Virginia document may contradict a will filed in Vermont, where Buck died, that left her literary rights to her estate.
Buck started the foundation in 1964 to help Amerasian children and others, and left the group her Bucks County farm, where she raised seven adopted children and wrote many of her later works.
Mintzer still hopes the manuscript can be displayed there later this year.
"It's awesome to have recovered it and to share it with the public would be a great thing," said Mintzer, who feared that few people would see it in West Virginia.
"The Good Earth," Buck's most famous book, follows the life of a peasant farmer in pre-Revolutionary China, and proved riveting to Americans who knew little about the culture. Buck, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, lived mostly in China from infancy through age 40. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and helped earn Buck the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.
West Virginia Wesleyan College stores Buck's papers for the birthplace.
Steve Hunter, a lawyer who represents the birthplace, said Tuesday that his group will pursue a lawsuit if necessary to recover the manuscript. Federal officials, who did not pursue charges against the secretary's daughter, said they have returned it to the estate.
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born in Hillsboro on June 26, 1892. She married twice, first to economist John Buck and later to her publisher, Richard Walsh.
Edgar S. Walsh, administrator of his mother's estate, said Monday that he was unfamiliar with the birthplace's claims to the manuscript and declined to comment.
Pearl S. Buck Birthplace: http://www.pearlsbuckbirthplace.com/
Pearl S. Buck International: http://www.psbi.org
