The return of the mockingbird
Reclusive U.S. author Harper Lee, 88, stuns readers with news that an early novel lost for decades, featuring Scout and Atticus Finch, will be published in July
In the publishing world, a new book by Harper Lee is the Holy Grail.
It’s actually an old book, one written even before her Pulitzer Prize-winning
To Kill a Mockingbird. Titled Go Set a Watchman, the book will be released on July 14, almost 55 years to the day after her first book appeared on July 11, 1960.
“We were dumbfounded,” said Jonathan Burnham, publisher at Harper (an imprint of HarperCollins), speaking Tuesday about first learning of the book. “We’d heard reports of the existence of an earlier novel, but we believed it to have been long lost, as did Harper Lee.”
Lee’s lawyer found it affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird.
“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,” said Lee, 88, in a statement issued by her publisher, Harper. “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.”
Go Set a Watchman takes place during the mid-1950s and features many of the characters that appeared in To Kill a
Mockingbird. Though it was written first, Go Set a
Watchman is actually a sequel to Mockingbird. In the sequel, Scout returns from New York to visit her father in the small town of Maycomb, Ala., and deals with political and personal issues as she tries to get a better understanding of her father and his attitudes.
When Lee first submitted a novel to publishers J. B. Lippincott in 1957, she was told, according to the 1961 issue of Current Biography, “that her novel consisted of a series of short stories strung together, and she was urged to rewrite it.”
With the help of her editor, Tay Hohoff, Lee rewrote it from the perspective of a younger Scout. Two-and-a-half years later, in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was published. She set aside the previous book and never returned to it.
“It needs absolutely no editing,” Burnham said of that book now. “It’s absolutely perfect as it is. I think it will shed interesting light back on the story in To
Kill a Mockingbird, particularly . . . the relationship between Atticus the father and Scout,” said Burnham.
“But . . . in many ways it stands as a separate novel.”
Two million copies of the 304-page book will be published, an unusually ambitious print run but, given the enormous anticipation, not unrealistic. It will be coming out in hardcover and as an ebook.
Mockingbird had a monumental cultural impact in North America. Atticus Finch was immortalized by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation, which won three Academy Awards.
The book became a standard text in schoolrooms around the world, making headlines recently in the U.K. when it was taken off school reading lists for the first time. In Canada, Lawrence Hill, author of
The Book of Negroes — in criticizing an attempt to ban the book from a school in Brampton in 2009 — wrote in the Star that Mockingbird was “handed to Canadian high school students as the one and only book they will be asked to read in class about racism, segregation and the experiences of black people.” (He hoped for more books in that vein.)
While the publishing world and fans have hoped for years there would be another book by Lee — who at one point had studied to be a lawyer and who now lives in a care facility in Monroeville, Ala. — she maintained a steadfastly reclusive life where even small snippets of news made headlines.
Lee’s sister Alice died last year at the age of 103. She was a lawyer and had continued to practise until just a few years before her death. In 2013, Lee launched a lawsuit against a local museum, virtually a shrine dedicated to her book, in a trademark dispute.
There are no authorized biographies, although unauthorized ones have been written. The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee was published last summer and written by then friend and Chicago Tribune journalist Marja Mills who
“It needs absolutely no editing. It’s absolutely perfect as it is.” JONATHAN BURNHAM PUBLISHER, ON HARPER LEE’S NEW NOVEL, GO SET A WATCHMAN
lived beside Lee between 2004 and 2006 (Lee denied co-operating on the book).
Mills said in an interview that Nelle (Lee’s given name) and her sister Alice “wrote, and talked about the rigours and the years that went into To Kill a Mock
ingbird being revised and reshaped in the form that we all know.”
While they didn’t talk about another book, she wrote, “they did discuss some planning for how certain things would be handled posthumously — where her papers might be housed . . . She had an appreciation for the interest in Mockingbird, all those years later, for what it still means for so many people.”
Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in May 1961 — worth $500 at the time. The novel has since sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.