Pearl Buck and the Posthumous Novel

A short time ago, I came across Shortlist.com’s list of the “30 Greatest Posthumous Novels.” There were the usual suspects: Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, etc. etc. Some of the books on the list I had read or just heard of, and some I was surprised to learn were published after the author’s death. Not knowing the circumstances behind the posthumous publications of most of these works, though, allowed me to fit them into my mental bookcase with ease. Okay, so The Mysterious Stranger was published six years after Twain’s death, but all that was nearly a century ago. Not much, therefore, has changed when I think about Twain’s body of work.

Review: The Eternal Wonder by Pearl S. Buck

The Eternal Wonder by Pearl S. Buck (Open Road Media, 2013, 304 pages)

It is rare to come across a novel that not only tells a fascinating story, but has taken a fascinating journey on its own. The Eternal Wonder, this elegant, quiet, and patient novel about an artistic genius's psychological and emotional development, was only recently discovered in a storage unit in Texas, forty years after Buck died in Vermont. And we should all be supremely grateful for that discovery, for Buck's final(?) novel anchors and broadens an already esteemed body of work, one that won her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.