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In the classic American story, opportunity is always in front of you. You finish school, find a job, buy a home and start a family; it's a rosy dreamscape.

But that world is one-dimensional. Income inequality is just about as American as baseball and apple pie. And though the economy has improved in the past few years, the unemployment rate for black Americans, now 13.2 percent, is about double that for white Americans.

“ Whites disproportionally hold the best jobs, the jobs with the highest incomes, and we still live in a quite segregated society.

The writer Pearl S. Buck emerged into literary stardom in 1931 when she published a book called The Good Earth. That story of family life in a Chinese village won the novelist international acclaim, the Pulitzer, and eventually, a Nobel Prize. Her upbringing in China as the American daughter of missionaries served as inspiration for that novel and many, many others; by her death in 1973, Buck had written more than 100 books, including 43 novels.

Last December, Buck's son Edgar Walsh — who now manages her literary estate — received an email with some unexpected news. A 44th novel by his mother had been discovered in Texas.

"Someone, and I do not know who, took the manuscript from the house in which [Buck] died in Vermont and went away with it," Walsh says. "Whoever that person was wound up in Texas, rented a storage unit and put the manuscript in there. And that's where it was found."

The family had some trouble over the years, he tells NPR's Jacki Lyden, but things have been pretty good lately. His mother's work experienced a resurgence of attention in 2004 when Oprah selected The Good Earth for her book club.

Walsh didn't know Buck had spent her final years writing this novel.

"And I certainly didn't know someone had spirited the manuscript out of the home in which she had lived her last years in Vermont," he says, "and had concealed it from me and the family for 40 years."

Two manuscripts of the novel, titled The Eternal Wonder, were found — one typewritten and one written in the author's own handwriting. Fortunately, Walsh says, the estate was able to acquire the manuscripts without too much trouble.

"I contacted an attorney in Philadelphia [named] Peter Hearn," Walsh says. Hearn had helped Walsh with other disputes over Buck's work. "And [I] said, 'We will not give her what she's asking for, but we will pay her a modest sum of money, and we want it returned immediately.' That worked."

More About Pearl Buck:

The Two-Way

Book News: Newly Found Pearl Buck Novel To Be Published This Fall

West Point alum Donna McAleer was at her Utah home last week when she got a call asking if she'd "seen the latest."

A male Army sergeant, a friend told her, had just been charged with secretly photographing and videotaping at least a dozen female cadets at McAleer's alma mater.

Many of the women were naked; some images were taken in a bathroom at the U.S. Military Academy in New York. The revelations followed a rash of recent incidents, among them stunning reports that at least three ranking male officers overseeing military sexual assault prevention programs have themselves been charged in the past month with crimes ranging from sexual battery to stalking.

"How many of these stories are we going to hear?" asks McAleer, a field admissions officer for the academy. "I want to be able to, with confidence, encourage people — daughters and sons — to serve their country."

As the nation prepares to honor the war dead this Memorial Day weekend, a seeming epidemic of sexual assault and abuse reports has severely shaken that confidence.

A new Pentagon study estimates that 26,000 people in the Armed Forces were sexually assaulted last year. It's not entirely clear top brass understands the scope of the crisis: Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh suggested in recent Senate testimony that the spike in reports of sexual assaults in the military could be blamed on the "hook up mentality" of the country's young people.

Welsh has since apologized, but not before fanning outrage that's been building on Capitol Hill and beyond over the military's long failure to repair a system that has placed service members, especially women, in more danger of sexual assault than battlefield injury.

Obama's View

From President Obama's commencement address Friday at the U.S. Naval Academy:

Every day, our civil servants do their jobs with professionalism — protecting our national security and delivering the services that so many Americans expect. But as we've seen again in recent days, it only takes the misconduct of a few to further erode the people's trust in their government. That's unacceptable to me, and I know it's unacceptable to you.

And against this backdrop, what I said here four years ago remains true today: Our military remains the most trusted institution in America. When others have shirked their responsibilities, our Armed Forces have met every mission we've given them. When others have been distracted by petty arguments, our men and women in uniform come together as one American team.

And yet, we must acknowledge that even here, even in our military, we've seen how the misconduct of some can have effects that ripple far and wide. In our digital age, a single image from the battlefield of troops falling short of their standards can go viral and endanger our forces and undermine our efforts to achieve security and peace. Likewise, those who commit sexual assault are not only committing a crime, they threaten the trust and discipline that make our military strong. That's why we have to be determined to stop these crimes, because they've got no place in the greatest military on Earth.

NPR's Bob Mondello and Susan Stamberg read excerpts of two of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. They read Snowflake by Winona Wendth of Lancaster, Mass., and Geometry by Eugenie Montague of Los Angeles. You can read their full stories below and find other stories on our Three-Minute Fiction page or on Facebook.

I found your journal in my car. A slim, Moleskin, six by ten centimeters, soft cover, blue, curving upwards at the edges like an incredibly shallow bowl, or a key dish. By the concavity in its form, the book seemed to be suggesting it was capable of carrying something. Something real. Not much. A few pennies. A handful of nails. One heavy pen cradled at that depression in the center, which had dropped out of the flatness of the book from riding around in the back pocket of your jeans.

The journal had slipped from that pocket onto the black leather of my car seat. You had not felt its absence as you climbed out and gathered your belongings from the space where your feet had recently been. A backpack, a tote bag and a travel coffee cup, blue, white letters advertising Rudy's Deli faded from washing.

The journal's pages are rounded and secured to the spine with thread. Did I see it slip from your pocket? And if so, why did I fail to draw your attention to it?

Perhaps I feared giving you the impression I had been looking at that pocket as you climbed from my car. Burnt orange thread edging dark denim. A small tear at the bottom left corner spilling white — not orange — thread. Why?

Right before I opened your book, it occurred to me that you had intended for me to find it, that you felt it slip from you, saw the blue cover on black leather and left it anyway, that you felt — as I felt — a desire to collapse the space between us. A desire to come closer. I could touch that pocket, I often thought, watching how it advanced towards me and then withdrew as your body sloped up and then out of my car. I could touch that pocket except for in the space between my hand and that dark denim half-diamond, the world drops off. Perhaps you — like I — had been perseverating over this distance and the implications it had for Euclidean geometry.

Because the shortest route from Point A — my hand resting lightly on the gearshift — to Point B — your pocket — was not a straight line. The distance could not be traversed before first traveling to some other point not on that line. It occurred to me, as I opened the pages of your book, that you not only recognized the fact of that other point, but also that I did not know how to find it. The journal was a map you had constructed to help me get there. I felt, as my fingers slipped into your pages for the first time, an overwhelming sense of gratitude that you would do this for me.