Harper Lee, the reclusive author of the beloved bestselling novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” will publish a second recently discovered novel in July, her publisher announced yesterday.
The novel, titled, “Go Set a Watchman,” was completed in the mid-1950s, in the midst of the civil rights movement. It takes place 20 years after “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Though it’s effectively a sequel, Lee actually wrote “Go Set a Watchman” first. The 304-page novel takes place in the same fictional town, Maycomb, Alabama, and unfolds as Scout Finch, the feisty child heroine of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” returns to visit her father, Atticus.
Lee said in a statement released by her publisher that her editor at the time was taken with Scout’s childhood flashbacks, and told her to write a different novel from Scout’s perspective.
“I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told,” Lee, 88, a native of Monroeville, Alabama, said in the statement. That book become “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a classic that won the Pulitzer Prize, was adapted into a 1962 film and has sold more than 40 million copies globally since it was published in 1960.
It continues to sell more than 1 million copies a year, and has been translated into more than 40 languages.
The novel, which is considered to be an American masterpiece and became a staple of school curriculums, is set in Alabama during the Depression, as the young Scout and her family get swept up in the trial of a black man who is accused of raping a white woman.
Scout’s father, Atticus, who was played by Gregory Peck in the film adaptation, represents the accused man at trial. The novel explores themes of racial prejudice and injustice as well as love and a young girl’s coming of age.
Lee never published another novel, despite pleas and prodding from readers and the literary establishment. She settled into a reclusive life and has rarely given interviews since the 1960s, telling an interviewer in 1964 - her last major piece of publicity - that “I didn’t expect the book to sell in the first place”, and that the reaction was “just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected ... like being hit over the head and knocked cold”.
She set the earlier book aside, and thought the draft had been lost or destroyed.
Then last fall, her friend and lawyer, Tonja Carter, discovered the manuscript of “Go Set a Watchman” in what Lee said was “a secure location,” attached to an original typescript of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“After much thought and hesitation I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years,” Lee said in a statement.
In a statement, Jonathan Burnham, Harper’s publisher, called the new novel “a compelling and ultimately moving narrative about a father and a daughter’s relationship, and the life of a small Alabama town living through the racial tensions of the 1950s.”
Go Set a Watchman receives brief mention in biographies of Lee; in A Jury of Her Peers Elaine Showalter writes that “the editors at JB Lippincott were impressed, but found the book patchy and awkwardly structured, so they sent her off to rewrite it, a process that eventually took three drafts and two and a half years”.
UK and Commonwealth rights in the book were acquired by Penguin Random House. It will be published under the William Heinemann imprint - which originally published To Kill a Mockingbird all those years ago - on 14 July this year in plans for an initial print run of 2 million copies.
New York Times
