Buck passing

Rediscovered activist-author left a devilish legacy | Andrée Seu

Pearl Buck made the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer this month, 34 years after her death. The Philadelphia FBI had recovered the manuscript of her Pulitzer Prize--winning The Good Earth (1931), gone missing since 1966. (The loss prompted the author's conjecture before her death in 1973 that "the devil has it.")

The sleuth agency held a news conference to announce the joyous event, calling the document "priceless." The discovery further inflamed an already bitter relationship between Buck's children and her foundation, because now the parties can fight over ownership of the manuscript—but there's a much more important legacy. (We shall see that the devil has been busy indeed.)

Pearl S. Buck (née Sydenstricker) was born to laborers for the gospel in China, missionaries of the narrow-minded variety who believe that Jesus is the only truth, the way, and the life. In 1930, missionaries of another stripe commissioned Harvard professor William Ernest Hocking to head a study—"Rethinking Missions: A Layman's Inquiry after One Hundred Years" (1932)—that rocked the world of the older Sino-spiritual sowers.