With To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee arrived a fully fledged novelist – then after this brilliant start, disappeared from view. A second book will find many eager readers
One rarely gets a high-voltage shock in the literary world, a jolt from the blue. But the news has emerged that 88-year-old Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has discovered an earlier and unpublished novel of hers, Go Set a Watchman, and that it will be published soon. It’s not a sequel but one that she actually wrote first. It deals with many of the same beloved characters, such as Scout and Atticus Finch, 20 years after the events that occur in her famous – and only – novel, referring back to them in passing.
Apparently she submitted this first novel to an editor who suggested she might think about trying again, focusing squarely on those flashbacks to life in Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression. Lee decided this editor had a good idea, and she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, which appeared in 1960, when the author was 34.
It was a career-ending debut – but not in the usual sense. Lee won the Pulitzer prize for fiction: an astonishing bit of precocity. The novel sold extremely well and became a classic Hollywood film only two years after its publication. It has since sold millions and millions of copies and is a staple of the American school curriculum. In fact, my youngest son graduated from high school two years ago in Vermont, and he recently complained that he’d been “forced” to read To Kill a Mockingbird in each of his final six years of school. That’s overkill, perhaps, but the book remains a model of its kind, a vivid tale that unfolds over three years (1933 to 1935) in a dusty and exhausted little village in Alabama.
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Apparently she submitted this first novel to an editor who suggested she might think about trying again, focusing squarely on those flashbacks to life in Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression. Lee decided this editor had a good idea, and she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, which appeared in 1960, when the author was 34.
It was a career-ending debut – but not in the usual sense. Lee won the Pulitzer prize for fiction: an astonishing bit of precocity. The novel sold extremely well and became a classic Hollywood film only two years after its publication. It has since sold millions and millions of copies and is a staple of the American school curriculum. In fact, my youngest son graduated from high school two years ago in Vermont, and he recently complained that he’d been “forced” to read To Kill a Mockingbird in each of his final six years of school. That’s overkill, perhaps, but the book remains a model of its kind, a vivid tale that unfolds over three years (1933 to 1935) in a dusty and exhausted little village in Alabama.
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