Fifty-five years on, classic novel of the US south gets a sequel
IN 1963, a year before Harper Lee forswore speaking to the press, a reporter asked her whether her second novel after To Kill a Mockingbird was ‘‘coming slow’’. ‘‘Well,’’ she replied. ‘‘I hope to live to see it published.’’
Readers who shared that hope have waited for more than half a century for another published word by the publicity-shy author, but their patience will be rewarded on July 14.
Lee, 88, has agreed
to publish Go Set a Watchman, a novel that picks up her characters’ stories 20 years after the tumultuous events of her first book. Scout, Mockingbird’s protagonist, returns to her childhood home in Maycomb, Alabama, to visit a father she does not understand.
The book will serve as a sequel to Lee’s 1960 debut, although the author wrote Go Set a Watchman between 1955 and 1957.
Lee said in a statement that she was pleased that anyone thought it worthy of publication.
‘‘In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called Go Set a Watchman,’’ she said. ‘‘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 from the point of view of the young Scout [which became To Kill a Mockingbird]. I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told.
‘‘ I hadn’t realised it 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 they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.’’
The new novel will be published in Britain by Penguin Random House under its William Heinemann imprint, the same British publisher responsible for Lee’s first novel. In America it will be published by HarperCollins.
A spokeswoman for Penguin Random House said that Lee had not changed any of the story, which was complete when she set it aside in the late 1950s.
The publisher said in a statement that Scout, who is known by her full name of Jean Louise Finch, returns home from New York: ‘‘She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand both her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.’’
Lee had thought the manuscript had been lost.
The author, who was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, received the Pulitzer prize and other literary awards, but found herself unable to complete a second novel, The Long Goodbye.
Lee has spoken of her desire to write more about the goings-on in smalltown America, but by the 1970s her publishers had given up hope. Dickie Williams, her cousin, recalled asking her when she might produce another book. ‘‘Richard,’’ she replied. ‘‘When you’re at the top, there’s only one way to go.’’