"It's a family tragedy," said Edgar S. Walsh, one of Buck's sons, who administers the family trust that provides income for the writer's seven surviving children.
The real-life story of Buck's legacy resembles a tangled novel, mixing long-standing enmity among her children, whom she adopted after her only natural child was diagnosed as being developmentally disabled. In her final years, Buck disinherited her children when a man half her age - her dance instructor - won the novelist's affections and claimed her wealth.
After years of litigation, Buck's family and the charitable institution she founded managed to secure control of her assets. But the heirs and the foundation locked in their own battle over Buck's property, which remains unsettled.
"Everything now seems to have bubbled up to the surface," said John E. Long Jr., the chairman of Pearl S. Buck International, which promotes international adoption and children's issues from offices on the writer's farm near Perkasie.
As recently as January, PSBI, as the charity is known, sued to secure title to about 100 boxes of archival material that Buck's children say belongs to them.
Now the FBI has The Good Earth manuscript, along with about 100 letters to Buck from world figures - documents that mysteriously disappeared from her house more than 40 years ago. The manuscript fell into the FBI's hands after the family of Buck's former secretary attempted to sell it through a Philadelphia auction house.
PSBI and the Pearl S. Buck Family Trust have filed competing claims for the recovered material.
"I cannot understand how PSBI can assert any ownership claim to the manuscript," said Walsh, 70, who lives in Greenwich, Conn., and manages the trust that controls Buck's literary estate. "It boggles the mind."
The foundation says it owns everything that was in Buck's house, "and those documents would have been in the house had they not been taken," Long said.
