Plan B Forum

An unpublished novel by Harper Lee is to finally see the light of day, 60 years after the US author put it aside to write To Kill a Mockingbird.



Go Set a Watchman, which features the character Scout Finch as an adult, will be released on 14 July.

Lee wrote it in the mid-1950s but put it aside on the advice of her editor.

"I thought it a pretty decent effort." said Lee, now 88. "I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years."

Set in the fictional southern town of Maycomb during the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman sees Scout return from New York to visit her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch.

According to the publisher's announcement: "She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father's attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood."

Lee's editor persuaded her to rework some of the story's flashback sequences as a novel in their own right - and that book became To Kill a Mockingbird.

"I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told," the author revealed.

The manuscript was discovered last autumn, attached to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird.

"I hadn't realised it [the original book] had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it," Lee continued.

"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."

Harper Collins plans an initial print run of two million copies.

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in July 1960 and won a Pulitzer Prize. Two years later it was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Gregory Peck.

Lee has rarely spoken to the media since the 1960s and is unlikely to do any publicity for her "new" book.

Crackpot wrote:Is it a bad thing that I thought that was a picture of Bruce Jenner?

And those of us who think the book is perfect, who went on to construct our own adventures for our favorite father-daughter team, might feel less forgiving if our fantasy does not line up with Ms. Lee’s. It’s not only the fans that Ms. Lee has to look out for. While her first novel is firmly established in the canon, it is not universally supported. It has been under attack for years by some serious critics for being simplistic and problematic in a privileged-white-lady-solves-the-race-issue kind of way. Then there is the annoyingly enduring rumor that the book was really written by Ms. Lee’s friend Truman Capote.

The contemporary literary gatekeepers do not believe in gods (except perhaps for David Foster Wallace) and they enjoy tearing down false idols. There is a very good chance that this work, rejected by Ms. Lee’s original editor in the ’50s, may be substandard. And some critics say it’s not entirely clear that the 88-year-old Ms. Lee actually decided to publish this work herself.

It would be nice to think that whatever happens with “Go Set a Watchman,” even if the book really is not good at all, Ms. Lee’s place in literary history — and that of “Mockingbird” — will remain intact. We may not be able to remember anything from Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” follow-ups, but their failures do not move the original’s place from our hearts. The canon, however, is a fickle thing. What is classic one moment is outdated or surprisingly flawed the next.

“You realize that our Negro population is backward, don’t you?”

Atticus Finch, Go Set a Watchman

As the 21st century arrived, Atticus Finch topped an American Film Institute list of all-time movie heroes. Later, the admired lawyer from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was included in a charming book titled The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived.

So what’s to be done when a fictional icon breaks bad?

How did the Atticus the world thought it knew — portrayed in Mockingbird as owner of “a civilized heart” — become the cranky racist of Lee’s new-but-older novel Go Set a Watchman?

In February, the literary world was intrigued by the discovery of a manuscript written almost 60 years ago by the elusive Harper Lee, now a frail 89. It was written before Mockingbird (published in 1960) but was set 20 years later.

In the hours before Tuesday’s official publication, Mockingbird fans were shocked to learn the aging Atticus was bitter at the successes in the 1950s of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and at the demise of the Old South.

“In my experience, white is white and black’s black,” he tells his daughter, the grown-up Scout, now 26.

To Scout, or Jean Louise, his transformation was a calamity. “The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her.”

Generations of readers feel her pain.