"To Kill A Mockingbird" author set to publish a second novel

The author of To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, is set to publish a sequel, Go Set A Watchman. The sequel will be about the character Scout as an adult, set two decades after To Kill A Mockingbird. She will return home to visit her father, Atticus, in Maycomb, Alabama. She also confronts her attitudes and feelings about her childhood home. In this sequel, Atticus defends a wrongly accused black man of raping a white woman back in the 1930s. The manuscript for the novel was found when Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Brooks, was doing legal work for her. Brooks claims to have thought that the manuscript was an unfinished version of the previous novel before seeing that Scout was 20 years older than she had been in To Kill A Mockingbird. (www.dailymail.co.uk). Not knowing if the manuscript was finished, Brooks took it to Lee, who said it was finished and was the parent of the first book. Lee had thought the manuscript was long lost.

According to Lee, Go Set A Watchman was the original novel, written from the point of view of Scout as an adult. Lee’s editor, however, suggested that Lee write a novel from the young Scout’s point of view. It had been written in the mid 1950s, a few years before To Kill A Mockingbird was published. Since then, the manuscript had been “lost” up until the fall of 2014 when Brooks found it in a secure location along with an original copy of To Kill A Mockingbird.

Skepticism and questioning has accompanied the news about the soon-to-be-published novel. After the success of To Kill A Mockingbird, Lee had vowed she would never publish again, saying “I wrote one good book and that was enough.” Some are skeptical about whether Lee knew enough about the decision for publication to have supported the idea. Others, such as long-time friend Wayne Flynt, claim that when visiting Lee the day before, she seemed completely lucid. Lee claims to be “happy as hell with the reactions to Watchman.” While there is much skepticism about the book, it is set to be published on July 14, 2015.