Lost and Found (pg. 2)

"Pearl S. Buck emerged into literary stardom in 1931 when she published a book called The Good Earth. That story of family life in a Chinese village won the novelist international acclaim, the Pulitzer and, eventually, a Nobel Prize. Her upbringing in China as the American daughter of missionaries served as inspiration for that novel and many others; by her death in 1973, Buck had written more than 100 books, including 43 novels.

     Last December, Buck's son Edgar Walsh — who manages her literary estate — received an email with some unexpected news: A 44th novel by his mother had been discovered in Texas.
     'Someone, and I do not know who, took the manuscript from the house in which [Buck] died in Vermont and went away with it,' Walsh says. 'Whoever that person was wound up in Texas, rented a storage unit and put the manuscript in there. And that's where it was found.'"
— NPR
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"A newly discovered manuscript by the American Nobel prize winner Pearl S Buck is set for publication this autumn, 40 years after her death.
     Best known for her 1931 novel The Good Earth – a bestselling saga of a Chinese family which won her the Pulitzer – Buck took the Nobel in 1938, cited for 'her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.' Over the course of her life, she wrote more than 80 books, a mix of novels, short stories, children's and non-fiction titles, and now, 40 years after her death in 1973, a new piece of work has been discovered."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Strokes Of The Pen: Faust, The Devil, And "Cultivating Literary Friendships"

From: The Manhattan Rare Book Company

"It’s hard to explain to writing students that there are pods of very friendly, arguably moral authors who treat each other as if the literary life is led on a firing range. They meet you alertly, brightly drawing from natty holsters their own signs of power, rank and aid, and then requesting that you do the same. They aren’t evil, really, and the impulse behind it is so close to camaraderie it almost smells right. We all need help, and we all want to help each other, which makes the nuances of the transaction murky. Some people never see the problem at all and others treat every request like you’re asking for a toe of which they are particularly fond. In the end, parsing the aspirational nature of literary friendship is as much of a longshot as sexing the yeti. [...]
     But I thought I’d give it a shot, and luckily I had help. Because I’m a collector of art and old books, I get email notifications of auctions, and the day I was to lecture my students, an old autographed letter appeared on the Ira & Larry Goldberg auction site. It illustrated the nature of 'transactional' so beautifully I read it aloud that night.
     It’s a one-page, single-spaced TLS (as they say) [Typed Letter Signed]
from William Faulkner. He is reacting to a request for a blurb in this, 1961, his final full year of life. To summarize the career until then: he’d struggled, his work had gone out of print, he’d almost drunk himself to death in Hollywood, where he was a failure. In 1946, washed up, spit out, he’d had his forgotten work reissued in The Portable Faulkner. This was the lightning and the thunder that changed his life. Seemingly overnight, he made an entire region of America a viable place to pan for talent and story, he won the Nobel Prize, he won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award too, and by January 1961, he’d spent about 15 years taking what comforts he could as a celebrated, revered, and golden writer.

From: AllStarPics

     The addressee is named Joan Williams. She is 30 years old, and she’s written the manuscript for a first novel called The Morning and the Evening. I mention this because Faulkner doesn’t begin it with 'Dear Miss Williams.' [...]"
— Glen David Gold, Los Angeles Review of Books
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