(May 22, 2013)—Open Road Integrated Media, a digital publisher and multimedia content company, and InkWell Management, just announced a recently discovered novel by Pulitzer Prize– and Nobel Prize–winning author Pearl S. Buck, titled The Eternal Wonder. Buck wrote this moving and mesmerizing book shortly before she passed away in 1973. Forty years later, in January 2013, the manuscript was found in storage and brought to Open Road, Buck’s digital publisher. The Eternal Wonder will be published by Open Road on October 22, 2013, both in digital format and in a beautifully packaged paperback edition.
In a joint statement, Jane Friedman of Open Road, Michael Carlisle of InkWell, and Edgar S. Walsh, Buck’s son, said, “We are thrilled to discover and publish a novel by one of only two American women to ever win both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes. The Eternal Wonder is as brilliant and inspiring as Pearl Buck’s most famous works, and we look forward to readers across the world getting to enjoy this long-lost masterpiece this fall along with Buck’s other wonderful books.”
The Eternal Wonder, an Open Road E-riginal, is a personal and passionate fictional exploration of the themes that meant so much to Buck in her life. It tells the coming-of-age story of Randolph Colfax, an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris, a mission patrolling the demilitarized zone in Korea that will change his life forever—and, ultimately, to love.
Open Road currently digitally publishes and markets twenty-eight other titles from Buck’s renowned backlist, including The Big Wave, The Promise, A House Divided, and Buck’s Pulitzer Prize–winner, The Good Earth. Born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck was the daughter of missionaries and spent much of the first half of her life in China, where many of her books are set. In 1934, civil unrest in China forced Buck back to the United States. Throughout her life, she worked in support of civil and women’s rights, and established Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, the first American woman to do so.
