American writer and novelist (1892–1973) best known for The Good Earth, a novel that dramatizes family life in a 20th-century Chinese village, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932 and contributed to her receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Hand-corrected unsigned typed manuscript draft by Pearl S. Buck for a piece entitled "Our Dark People," sixteen pages, 8.5 x 11, no date but circa 1940. The draft has been extensively corrected in pencil throughout in Buck's own hand, with numerous additions, deletions, and revisions—ranging from a simple edit of a single word to the deletion of nearly an entire page. The article offers insightful commentary on racism and America's attitudes toward its Black citizens, beginning: "You have often asked me why we treat the descendants of former slaves as we still do, and I have delayed my answers. Perhaps I should still delay, since certainly what I say will be inadequate. The effect of slavery continues upon my country with little less strength today than in the day before the civil war. The stand of the country in this war for freedom is not to be understood without realizing this, for it is the prejudice against color, which is the aftermath of slavery, that, more than any other thing, explains the American sympathy with ruling Tory elements everywhere. America is a divided nation and the American is a divided individual because of the memory of slavery." In fine condition. Accompanied by an eleven-page typescript incorporating the changes that Buck made to the draft.
