Why To Kill a Mockingbird is overrated

Mockingbird’s ‘sequel’ Go Set a Watchman was written first so it might be truer to Harper Lee’s original vision

Mary Badham as the young Scout and Gregory Peck as Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird. Photograph: Corbis

Sarah Churchwell

Friday 6 February 2015 The Guardian

On Tuesday, I came out of a meeting to find a barrage of messages with the news that Harper Lee has written a sequel to her classic 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird and will be publishing it this summer. To say that I was startled would be putting it mildly; it was simply astonishing news. The novel’s many fans had long inured themselves to Lee’s seemingly irreversible decision not to write another novel. Her pen simply “froze”, Lee once declared, after the maelstrom of publicity and praise Mockingbird received, and she firmly rejected her loving, demanding audience’s repeated efforts to interview her or persuade her to write something more.

Then I saw the title of the “new” novel and realised that nothing had changed: Lee has not suddenly caved in to our desires and produced a sequel to Mockingbird at the age of 88. Scholars have long known of an earlier draft of Mockingbird called Go Set a Watchman (and at least one other title, if not another draft, called Atticus), and it is this book that will be published in the summer.

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The reason the word “sequel” has been bandied about is that Go Set a Watchman was drafted from the perspective of Scout as an adult in the 1950s, visiting Atticus back home in Maycomb, and remembering her childhood during the Depression. Lee was advised by an editor to redraft the novel from the child Scout’s point of view, cutting the later plot material and turning what had been flashbacks into the novel itself. This earlier draft will now be published; Lee’s agent reports that Lee told him it is not a sequel, but “the parent to Mockingbird”.

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