To Kill a Mockingbird will not be Harper Lee’s only published book after all.
Publisher Harper on Tuesday announced that Go Set a Watchman, a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed in the 1950s and put aside, would be released on July 14.
Rediscovered last fall, Go Set a Watchman is essentially a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, although it was finished earlier.
Photo: AFP
The 304-page book will be Lee’s second, and the first new work in more than 50 years.
The publisher plans a first printing of 2 million copies.
“In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called Go Set a Watchman,’ the 88-year-old Lee said in a statement issued by Harper. “It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel [what became To Kill a Mockingbird] from the point of view of the young Scout.”
“I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn’t realized it [the original book] had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. 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.
Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal was negotiated between Carter and the head of Harper’s parent company, Michael Morrison of HarperCollins Publishers. The book is to be published in the UK by William Heinemann, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
According to publisher Harper, Carter came upon the manuscript at a “secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird.”
The new book is set in Lee’s famed Maycomb, Alabama, during the mid-1950s, 20 years after To Kill a Mockingbird and roughly contemporaneous with the time that Lee was writing the story. The civil rights movement was taking hold in her home state. The US Supreme Court had ruled unanimously in 1954 that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955 led to the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott.
“Scout [Jean Louise Finch] has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus,” the publisher’s announcement reads. “She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.”
Lee herself is a Monroeville, Alabama native who lived in New York in the 1950s and returned to her hometown.
According to the publisher, the book is to be released as she first wrote it, with no revisions.
“To a lot of us in bookselling, To Kill A Mockingbird remains one of our all-time favorite books and it sure is exciting to know we are about to learn more of the story,” said Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, the trade group for the country’s independent stores.
To Kill a Mockingbird is among the most beloved novels in history, with worldwide sales topping 40 million copies.
It was released on July 11, 1960, won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a 1962 movie of the same name, starring Gregory Peck in an Oscar-winning performance as the courageous attorney Atticus Finch.
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