To Kill A Mockingbird author ‘set f ire to second secret novel’

AFTER the runaway success of To Kill A Mockingbird, author Harper Lee vowed never to write another novel.

So fans were stunned two years ago when she published Go Set A Watchman, the sequel set two decades after her Pulitzer Prizewinning masterpiece.

Now it has emerged that Lee, who died last year aged 89, wrote another secret novel – but set fire to the manuscript during a drunken night in New York.

The incident sheds new light on Lee’s state of mind after she became a literary sensation in 1960 with To Kill A Mockingbird.

George Malko, a neighbour of Lee in Manhattan in the 1960s, believes she kept on writing but never intended to publish again.

Revealing how he was once awoken by the author banging on his door at 2am, Mr Malko, a scriptwriter, told the MoS: ‘She had her demons – sometimes she drank. She was saying she needed a vodka. It had happened before, so I said we didn’t have any.

‘Then she told me, “I just threw 300 pages of a manuscript down the incinerator.”’

Mr Malko, 81, added: ‘I felt it was clear that she did not want to publish anything else.’