Mystery deepens over recently discovered Harper Lee manuscript
Another account suggests Go Set a Watchman novel found earlier than thought
On the eve of the most anticipated publishing event in years — the release of Harper Lee’s novel Go Set a Watchman — there is yet another twist to the tale of how the book made its way to publication, a development that further clouds the story of serendipitous discovery that generated both excitement and skepticism in February.
As HarperCollins, the publisher, and Lee’s lawyer, Tonja B. Carter, have told it, Carter set out to review an old typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird in August and happened upon an entirely different novel — one with the same characters but set 20 years later — attached to it.
“I was so stunned,” Carter told the New York Times last winter.
But another narrative has emerged that suggests the discovery may have happened years earlier, in October 2011, when Justin Caldwell, a rare books expert from Sotheby’s auction house, flew to Alabama to meet with Carter and Samuel Pinkus, then Lee’s literary agent, to appraise a Mockingbird manuscript for insur- ance and other purposes.
The discrepancy between the two accounts raises questions about whether the book was lost and accidentally recovered, and about why Lee would not have sought to publish it earlier.
The meeting, arranged by Pinkus, took place in Monroeville, Lee’s hometown, at a bank near the town square where some of Lee’s writings were kept in a safe-deposit box, along with a typewriter Lee had worked on.
Caldwell looked at two documents presented to him in a Lord & Taylor’s box, according to a person who was briefed on his account. The Mockingbird item turned out to be a publisher’s proof, not a particularly valuable item. The other was a typescript of a story that, like Mockingbird, was set in the fictional town of Maycomb and inhabited by the same people. But Caldwell noticed that the characters were older and the action set many years later, the person said. After reading about 20 pages and comparing passages to a published copy of Mockingbird for nearly an hour, Caldwell is said to have realized the differences and told the others in the room that it seemed to be an early version of the novel.
Carter acknowledged in a statement last week that she had accompanied Pinkus and Caldwell to the bank at the request of Alice Lee, the author’s sister. But she said that she was sent from the room to run an errand before any review of the materials occurred. She denied ever learning that a different manuscript had been found that day.
“If Sam discovered the Go Set a Watchman manuscript at that time, he told neither me nor Miss Alice nor Nelle,” Carter said in the statement, using the name that family and friends call Harper Lee.
Both Pinkus and Sotheby’s, however, say Carter was there during Caldwell’s 2011 review.
Pinkus was later fired by Carter and sued in 2013 by Harper Lee, who accused him of duping her into transferring the copyright for Mockingbird to him. That lawsuit was settled out of court.
Sotheby’s confirmed the meeting in a statement: “On October 12, 2011, Sotheby’s specialist Justin Caldwell travelled to Monroeville, Alabama, to look at a number of items at the request of Harper Lee’s literary agent, Samuel Pinkus. Present at the meeting, which took place in the viewing room of a bank below the law offices of Barnett, Bugg, Lee & Carter, LLC, were Tonja Carter and Samuel Pinkus.”
Did Caldwell discover Watchmanin his review? His depiction of the manuscript as an early version of Mockingbird, in which the characters were older, closely matches HarperCollins’s description of the book. But Carter and the publisher have said the lost manuscript had been affixed to an original manuscript of Mockingbird, not a publisher’s proof of the kind Caldwell is said to have found.
The differences in the accounts of when and how the manuscript was discovered could add a wrinkle to the highly anticipated release of Watchman.
News of the publication delighted fans eager to read another novel by Lee. But it also represented an abrupt turnaround for an author who had said she did not intend to publish another work and then, late in life, agreed to venture out with a book that had initially been dismissed as an ambitious but disjointed first draft.
Some have questioned whether Alice Lee, the older sister who served as the author’s caretaker and counsel for decades, would have approved of the decision to publish. The publisher has not said whether Alice, infirm in the fall of 2014, was consulted on that decision. By the time the Watchman release was announced, in February, Alice had been dead for three months.
Harper, a HarperCollins imprint, will release Watchman on July 14, with a first printing of two million copies. The novel is the most preordered book in the company’s history.
After the announcement, Carter declined most interviews and provided a limited account of her discovery. She said the manuscript had been held in a “secure place,” but denied it had been the safe-deposit box. She said she had made the discovery in August, although the publisher originally said it had been found in the fall. She acknowledged, in an exchange of emails with the New York Times, that she had seen the manuscript before August 2014 but said that she, “like everyone else, did not know what it was.”
At the time of the announcement, Jonathan Burnham, an executive with HarperCollins, gave The Atlantic his own account of Carter’s discovery. She had been checking on “the state of being on the original, very valuable manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird” when she stumbled upon the manuscript, he said.
“This was,” he continued, “the first time the manuscript had been found since heaven-knows-when.”