Mockingbird author ‘set fire 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 Prize-winning 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, which was later turned into a Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck as lawyer Atticus Finch and Mary Badham as his young daughter Scout.
George Malko, a neighbour of Lee in Manhattan in the 1960s, believes she kept on writing after her success but never intended to publish again.
Revealing how he was once awoken by the author banging on his door at 2am, Malko, a scriptwriter, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘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, who remained in touch with Lee until her death, said she did not appear distraught by her actions.
He added: ‘I felt it was clear that she did not want to publish anything else.’