Forty years after being written, an unpublished novel by Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, will be released this fall, her publisher said on Tuesday. The manuscript was stumbled upon in a storage unit in Texas and returned to the Buck family in December in exchange for a small fee, said Jane Friedman, the chief executive of Open Road Integrated Media, the publisher. Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is believed to have completed the manuscript for the book, “The Eternal Wonder,” shortly before she died of cancer in 1973, said her son Edgar S. Walsh, who manages her literary estate. While in her late 30s, she wrote “The Good Earth,” her second and most famous novel, a compassionate portrait of Chinese farmers that was published in 1931 and became the biggest-selling novel in the United States for two successive years. Photo 
 
 Oprah Winfrey revived the Buck canon by choosing “The Good Earth” as one of her book club selections in 2004.
– It's not quite accurate to say that a "long-lost" manuscript by Nobel laureate Pearl Buck has turned up 40 years after her death, because nobody knew the thing existed in the first place. Buck, who also won the Pulitzer for her 1931 novel the Good Earth, apparently wrote Eternal Wonder shortly before she died in 1973, and it somehow made its way to a storage unit in Texas, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. A woman who found it recently turned it over to Buck's foundation for a "small fee," and it will be published in October. Buck was incredibly prolific—critics think maybe a little too prolific, notes the New York Times—so it's not a huge shock that she managed to crank out an entire novel late in life without anyone noticing. The publisher's description of the upcoming book: It's a "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 and on a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea that will change his life forever—and, ultimately, to love.”