MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A large collection of works from Pearl S. Buck, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pocahontas County native, Nobel Laureate and humanitarian, will be dedicated at West Virginia University during an event later this week.
“It’s a very extensive collection,” said John Cuthbert, director and curator of the West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University. “It sort of runs the gamut in terms of the things that she wrote.”
During her life, Buck wrote more than 100 books total.
“In addition to that, she did some children’s works and plays and lectures and, in terms of the total body of what she wrote during her lifetime, my understanding is we have in this collection roughly about 80 percent of the manuscripts to everything that she wrote,” Cuthbert said.
The writings, owned by the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation, are being permanently deposited in Morgantown as part of a cooperative agreement involving the Foundation, WVU and West Virginia Wesleyan.
Cuthbert said the manuscripts and other items will be preserved, stored and catalogued for study — in-house and online — as part of a larger effort to educate more people about Buck’s contributions to the literary world beyond her most well-known novel, The Good Earth, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.
Born in Hillsboro to missionary parents in 1892, she was taken to China as a baby and spent much of her first 40 years of life there.
But, Cuthbert said, Buck was always tied to West Virginia in some way. “I have to respond vociferously that she did, in fact, consider herself a West Virginian,” he said on Monday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”
Buck continued to write up until her death in 1973.
Representatives from WVU, West Virginia Wesleyan and the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation will be part of Thursday’s public dedication event in the Robinson Reading Room at WVU’s Downtown Library. It begins at 10 a.m.
The dedication comes during Mountaineer Week at WVU — a week-long celebration of the heritage and culture of West Virginia.