David Bloom, Freeman's vice president of manuscripts and books, notified the FBI this month of the discovery after determining that the manuscript had been reported stolen in the 1970s by Buck's heirs, who suspected that an employee or someone with access to the house had taken it.
Bloom said the document contained "a large number of annotations in her hand, including changes of phrases that would be of real interest to Pearl S. Buck scholars." The consignment also included several letters to Buck from world figures.
Bloom did not identify the consignor, but said the person appeared to have taken the manuscript in "with all innocence and good faith."
Bloom said the FBI told him it did not plan to file criminal charges.
The Good Earth, a novel about village family life in China, became an immediate sensation upon its publication in 1931, and established Buck as one of the few Westerners with intimate knowledge of life in China before the communist revolution. Buck, the child of Presbyterian missionaries, spent much of the first half of her life in China.
"For two generations of Americans, Buck invented China," Peter Conn, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a 1996 biography of Buck.
The Good Earth, the second of Buck's 70 novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.
After Buck won the Nobel Prize - she was the first American woman to win the honor - she was set on a course as a leader of civil rights and women's rights, and as a pioneer in international adoption and racial understanding.
