Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee review – a literary curiosity

Is Lee’s companion piece to the classic Mockingbird worth the wait?

George W Bush awards the presidential medal of freedom to Harper Lee in 2007. Photograph: Larry Downing/Reuters

Robert McCrum

Sunday 19 July 2015  The Observer

The main thing you need to know about Go Set a Watchman (a title derived from Isaiah 21:6) is that its author, Harper Lee, was born in Monroeville, Alabama, in 1926 and lives there still, blind, deaf and 89. More than her one published novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, this new book, said to be “the publishing event of the decade”, shows Lee stuck on the race politics of the deep south like a feather on a tar barrel.

In her 20s, Lee made her one bid for another life among the Yankees and moved to New York City, where she worked on the reservations desk of an airline, the British Overseas Air Corporation, and began to write. The Jean Louise Finch of Go Set a Watchman who comes home to Maycomb, Alabama, to visit her ageing, arthritic father is no longer “Scout Finch, juvenile desperado, hell-raiser extraordinary” but someone much closer to her creator.

An exclusive extract from the new novel by Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, published on 14 July

Lee’s first novel cost her dear. At one point, she threw the manuscript out of her apartment window into the snow. The genesis of Go Set a Watchman is mysterious but in 1957, Lee’s agent submitted it to publishers as “an eye-opener for many northerners in the segregation battle”, and it was signed up by Tay Hohoff, an editor at JB Lippincott.

More