This July, Harper Lee’s second novel will be published. It’s titled Go Set a Watchman, and it’s kind of a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, although it was written before To Kill a Mockingbird. Watchman is about a grown-up Scout returning to a Maycomb divided by the civil rights movement to visit her father. A statement by Lee reports that Watchman originally featured flashback sequences that her editor convinced her to break out into their own novel, which would eventually become Mockingbird. Watchman has supposedly been lost for decades and only recently found; it resurfaces at a tumultuous time in Lee’s life.
Last November, Lee’s sister, Alice Lee, passed away. Alice was the model for Atticus Finch in many ways and she also protected the semi-reclusive Harper from the outside world. At the beginning of last year, Harper Lee settled a lawsuit with a local museum that she claimed was selling “merchandise featuring her name and the title of her novel without compensation.” Last July, the Vulture culture blog published a long story titled “The Decline of Harper Lee.”
To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, and the classic film adaptation arrived two years later. We haven’t seen much of Harper Lee in the years since. What do you think about this news?