Harper Lee 'To Kill a Mockingbird' history - Business Insider print The movie adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird" with Gregory Peck. Universal Very few Americans, young or old, haven't been affected by "To Kill a Mockingbird" — a literary classic widely read in schools and later in life. But as the world mourns Harper Lee's death this week , one fact of the 1960 novel's publication remains little-known. "To Kill a Mockingbird," when it was first submitted to its publisher, wasn't like the "To Kill a Mockingbird" we know at all. It had a different title, "Go Set a Watchman," a version of which was published just last year by HarperCollins after an apparent discovery of a manuscript. As the New York Times has reported , Lee and her agents sent a draft of "Watchman" to publishers in 1957, and J. B. Lippincott and Company bought it for $1,000. But the editor who worked with Lee, Therese von Hohoff Torrey , didn't want the draft Lee submitted.

"Watchman" (both the initial draft and the one published recently) followed the same characters as "Mockingbird," in Maycomb, Alabama, but 20 years later, at which point Scout is an adult and, as it turns out, Atticus Finch has become a bigot. Harper Lee. Chip Somodevilla/Getty The editor saw promise but described this draft as "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel." So she suggested to Lee that she set the book much earlier, in Scout's childhood. The rewriting process took two years. Here's how the Times describes it: The notecard system Ms. Williams used to track individual works bolsters the view that, at the time, Ms. Williams viewed “Watchman” as a first draft. She did not, for example, create two cards for two books, just one that tracks the evolution of “Watchman” into “Mockingbird.” At the top of the card, the original title is crossed out to make room for the new one. In 1959, when the rewritten novel passed muster, Ms. Lee expressed her relief in a letter to Ms. Williams.

“I was plain afraid for you to read it and go through the bitter disappointment of two years wasted effort a’borning a writer,” she wrote. The next year, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published and became an instant best seller. You can see the notecard from Lee's agent, dated 1957, crossing out "Go Set a Watchman" and replacing it with "To Kill a Mockingbird" below: Columbia University in the City of New York Reporting also shows that, following the release of "Mockingbird," when anticipation grew for another book from Harper Lee (which never came), she and the publisher did not consider "Watchman" a viable contender — though, of course, now it has reached the public's hands. Curious circumstances, however, surround "Watchman's" release, with some evidence suggesting Lee may never have wanted the book published at all . If it hadn't been for the editor's coaching, "To Kill a Mockingbird" likely wouldn't exist, and we wouldn't know Lee as the literary superstar she is.

Harper Lee, author of classic novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' dies at 89 - LA Times Harper Lee, author of classic novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' dies at 89 Harper Lee Harper Lee, author of "To Kill a Mockingbird," has died at 89. Harper Lee, author of "To Kill a Mockingbird," has died at 89. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images) Elaine Woo and Valerie J. Nelson “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the classic 1960 novel about racism in a small Southern town, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, became a staple of high school reading lists and turned its author into one of American literature’s most revered figures. But fame and its burdens overwhelmed Harper Lee, who wrote one masterpiece, then shut the door on an adoring public. She had hoped for modest approval of her debut work “but I got rather a whole lot," she once said, “and in some ways this was just about as frightening.” ------------ For the Record Harper Lee: In the Feb.

20 Section A, the obituary of author Harper Lee included a 2011 quote from her sister about Lee’s frailties, but incorrectly said she was disputing a claim that Lee had cooperated on a memoir. The quote saying Lee “can’t see and can’t hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence” referred to a letter Lee issued saying she hadn’t cooperated on the memoir. Also, an earlier version of the obituary said the character of Atticus in "Go Set a Watchman" denounces segregation. In "Watchman," he opposes desegregation efforts. ------------ Her literary silence lasted 55 years, until a second manuscript suddenly surfaced: “Go Set a Watchman,” written before “Mockingbird” but set 20 years later, was published in 2015 amid tremendous fanfare and record-breaking sales. Yet it only deepened the mystery surrounding Lee. What impact did “To Kill a Mockingbird” have on you? Join the conversation on Facebook Where had the manuscript been all those years? Was it a sequel to “Mockingbird” or just the first draft? Was the decision to publish it really Lee’s?

Or had the octogenarian author, struggling with the infirmities of age, been manipulated to release a work she had buried so long? Lee, as had been her habit, gave no interviews, remaining an enigma until her death on Friday. The author, whose death at 89 was confirmed by publisher HarperCollins and officials in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., sparked a national conversation about racism with “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Lee, who died on Friday at 89 in her hometown Monroeville, Ala., is being remembered not only by figures in the publishing... Although for decades she only had one published book to her name, Harper Lee influenced generations of readers worldwide who fell in love with her novel "To Kill a Mockingbird." Lee, who died on Friday at 89 in her hometown Monroeville, Ala., is being remembered not only by figures in the publishing...

(Michael Schaub) Loosely based on her life growing up in the small Alabama town of Monroeville in the 1930s, it was a coming-of-age story as well as a gripping tale of injustice, told from the perspective of a rambunctious 6-year-old girl named Scout. She is awakened to the ugly realities of life in the Old Confederacy when her lawyer father, Atticus Finch, defends a black man accused of raping a white woman. Other central characters include Scout’s daredevil older brother Jem, local recluse Boo Radley, the Finches’ black housekeeper Calpurnia, and Scout’s and Jem’s playmate, Dill. Dill, Lee later said, was based on her childhood friend Truman Capote , who spent summers at his relatives’ house next door to the Lees. The two remained close as writers, with Lee providing crucial reporting help when Capote went to Kansas in 1959 to investigate a murder that became the focal point of his most famous book, “In Cold Blood.” Scout, Dill and the others were all outsiders in some sense, a plight at the core of “Mockingbird” and its lessons.

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” Atticus tells Scout. “Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” One of the reasons for the book’s enduring appeal is that it “asks one of the most important questions facing humans — how to get along with people different from us,” said Charles J. Shields, who wrote a well-regarded 2006 biography of Lee, called “Mockingbird.” “To Kill a Mockingbird” has never been out of print, with more than 40 million copies sold in at least 40 languages. Major polls have ranked it close behind the Bible as one of the most influential books ever written. President George W. Bush said the novel “influenced the character of our country for the better” when he awarded Lee the Presidential Medal of Honor in 2007. Hollywood bolstered the book’s standing in popular culture with a faithful 1962 adaptation that earned three Academy Awards, including one for Gregory Peck as the noble Atticus, a character the American Film Institute later named the greatest movie hero of the 20th century.

“Go Set a Watchman” offers a darker examination of the conditions that would drive the civil rights campaigns of the ’60s. It takes place in the same fictional town, Maycomb, with most of the same characters. But Scout is a young woman of 26 who goes by her proper name, Jean Louise. And Atticus is no longer her guiding light. The principled idealist whose earlier portrayal inspired generations of lawyers, teachers and activists is, in “Watchman,” a racist who has mingled with Ku Klux Klan members and denounces desegregation. “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” he asks his daughter. Most critics said “Watchman” was a seriously flawed work, more interesting as artifact than literature.

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times called it “a lumpy tale about a young woman’s grief over her discovery of her father’s bigoted views” and found it lacking the lyricism of “Mockingbird.” Other critics were more welcoming, such as the Guardian’s Mark Lawson, who called the new work “a pleasure, revelation and genuine literary event, akin to the discovery of extra sections from T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ or a missing act from ‘Hamlet’ hinting that the prince may have killed his father.” The old manuscript was discovered in a bank vault by Lee’s lawyer, Tonja B. Carter. Her accounts of the discovery varied; she said she might have handled it in 2011 without realizing what it was, but in 2014 she ascertained that it was not, as she first believed, merely a rough draft of “Mockingbird.” The sudden appearance of a second novel raised suspicions that Lee, who had a stroke in 2007, was not fully engaged in the decision to publish it.

HarperCollins announced the book’s release just a few months after the death of Alice Lee , the author’s older sister and a prominent local attorney (Lee called her “Atticus in a skirt”), who had long acted as her legal and literary guardian. In 2011, Alice had commented on her sister’s frailties. “Poor Nelle Harper can’t see and can’t hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence,” Alice, calling her sister by her given name, wrote in a statement disputing a claim that Lee had cooperated with writer Marja Mills’ memoir about them. Alabama investigators, acting on a complaint that Lee had been tricked into publishing the second novel, interviewed the author at her Monroeville nursing home but determined that she had consented to its publication. “Watchman” became HarperCollins’ fastest-selling book, with sales that exceeded 1 million copies in the first week alone. has died at the age of 89 .

Last year, when the prequel to her signature work "To Kill a Mockingbird" was released, we took a look at ways in which the original novel has influenced American culture: If you went to junior high or high school in the United States,... Editor's note: Author Harper Lee has died at the age of 89 . Last year, when the prequel to her signature work "To Kill a Mockingbird" was released, we took a look at ways in which the original novel has influenced American culture: If you went to junior high or high school in the United States,... (Michael Schaub) The book provided scholars and others with new clues about the literary legend who had so avoided the limelight for so long. Like the grown-up Scout of “Watchman,” Lee had left her tight-knit family to build a separate life in New York, but ultimately heeded the call to go home. “Hell is eternal apartness,” she wrote in “Watchman” about the young woman who struggles with disillusionment after she returns to the South. “What had she done that she must spend the rest of her years reaching out with yearning for them, making secret trips to long ago, making no journey to the present?

I am their blood and bones, I have dug in this ground, this is my home. But I am not their blood, the ground doesn’t care who digs it, I am a stranger at a cocktail party.” Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville on April 28, 1926, the youngest of four children of Frances Finch and Amasa Coleman Lee. She was a precocious child who read better than most of her classmates. And she was, like the fictional Scout, a tomboy who, according to biographer Shields, “rebelled at everything her mother valued.” Capote would later use Lee as the model for the wild Idabel Thompkins in his first novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” published in 1948. Lee’s mother was often sick, leaving much of her upbringing to the family’s black housekeeper, Hattie. Lee was close to her father, an attorney and editor of the local paper, and often sat in the courthouse gallery to watch him try cases. One day he brought home an old typewriter, thinking his highly imaginative daughter and her friend Truman would be able to entertain themselves with it, which they did, writing stories and plays in her backyard.

At Huntingdon College for women in Montgomery, Ala., Lee stood out because of her salty language, aversion to dresses and affinity for smoking pipes. She later transferred to the University of Alabama, where she was editor of the campus paper and studied law. After spending the summer of 1948 studying literature at Oxford University in England, however, she dropped out of law school a semester short of earning a degree and poured her energies into becoming a writer. In 1949 she moved to New York City. For several years she supported herself as an airline reservations clerk, reserving her nights and weekends for writing stories that recalled her life in a small Southern town. Her mother, who had diabetes and was overweight, died in 1951; weeks later, Lee’s brother Edwin died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 30. In 1957 she showed a handful of stories to an agent, Maurice Crain, who urged her to develop one of them into a novel, but Lee hesitated, afraid that her job would not leave her enough time to write. Then came the Christmas present she would never forget.

Lee had befriended other writers in New York, including Michael and Joy Brown, a couple who drew her into their family circle. Although not affluent, they had had a good year. That Christmas they wrote a check that provided Lee with enough money to live on for a year. Harper Lee | 1926-2016 Read more stories Lee quit her job to write full time. Five months later, she had a manuscript that her agent deemed good enough to send to publishers, including J.B. Lippincott. The title was “Go Set a Watchman,” a title derived from the Old Testament verse in which Isaiah foresees the fall of Babylon. “There were many things wrong about it,” Tay Hohoff, who became her editor at Lippincott, later wrote of Lee’s first effort. “It was more a collection of short stories than a true novel. And yet, there was also life.… The people walked solidly on the pages; they could be seen and heard and felt.” Hohoff advised the young writer to recast the story from Scout’s eyes.

“I was a first-time writer,” Lee said in a statement released decades later, when the publication of “Watchman” was announced, “so I did what I was told.” After more than two years of rewriting — during a tense period in the South following Supreme Court rulings on the desegregation of public schools and buses — “Mockingbird” was published on July 11, 1960. It was featured by three major book clubs — Reader’s Digest, the Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club — and shot to the top of bestseller lists, where it remained for nearly two years. Despite resounding commercial success, it received mixed notices from critics. Atlantic Monthly found the story “frankly and completely impossible, being told in the first person by a 6-year-old girl with the prose style of a well-educated adult.” But Time magazine wrote that Lee “cuts through cant, and she teaches the reader an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life.” The first half of the novel offers a nostalgic vision of small-town Southern life, focusing on the preoccupations and misadventures of Scout, Jem and Dill.

They are obsessed with drawing out Boo Radley, the recluse neighbor rumored to eat raw squirrels and stalk the streets at night. The second half explores the effect on the children of the case of Tom Robinson, a black tenant farmer accused of rape by one of the town's poor whites. Much to the outrage of Atticus' neighbors in racially divided Maycomb, the lawyer presents a solid, if doomed, defense of Robinson. The trial in the book is often compared to the famous Scottsboro case, which took place in Alabama in the 1930s when Lee was about Scout's age. The case, which involved nine African American defendants wrongly accused of rape, twice went up to the U.S. Supreme Court and stood as an example of a jury system weighted against blacks. When asked soon after “Mockingbird” was published what message her book sent, Lee said she never intended it as “an indictment so much as a plea for something, a reminder to people at home.” Harper Lee was United Methodist in word, deed | The United Methodist Church Home / News & Media / United Methodist News / Harper Lee was United Methodist in word, deed White House photo by Eric Draper President George W.

Bush awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to author Harper Lee during a ceremony Monday, Nov. 5, 2007, in the East Room. Harper Lee was United Methodist in word, deed By Sam Hodges February 19, 2016 | DALLAS (UMNS) Harper Lee used the words “Methodist” and “John Wesley” in the first pages of her classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and Methodism figured in her life as well as her fiction. Lee’s death on Feb. 19, at 89, in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, brought expressions of sadness from fellow United Methodists. There was also deep gratitude for her work, particularly “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a Depression-era tale of race relations in the Deep South, published in 1960. “It’s not only a great piece of art, but it really is a grappling with America’s greatest problem,” said retired United Methodist Bishop Will Willimon, who led the North Alabama Conference. The Rev.

Matt Rawle, a United Methodist pastor and author of the book "The Faith of a Mockingbird," posted this on his blog : "Harper Lee will be missed, but her story will continue to focus an incarnational light shining toward justice." Dawn Wiggins Hare, top executive of the United Methodist Commission on the Status and Role of Women, knew Lee as a fellow resident of Monroeville and fellow member of First United Methodist Church in that town. “Imagine the strength of character, the undaunted courage, the ethical heart that a young 30-something woman from south Alabama would have to have to write a book about racial injustice before the Civil Rights Act had even passed,” said Hare, a former Alabama judge. “It took clarity of vision to see injustice in what was otherwise accepted as the norm.” Deep Methodist roots Born Nelle Harper Lee, the author grew up Methodist and was a longtime member of First United Methodist Church in Monroeville. Hare called the Lee family the “backbone” of the church and noted that the stained-glass windows in its chapel were given in honor of Lee’s parents.

Lee’s older sister, Alice, who died in 2014 at age 103 , was a lawyer and a leading layperson in the local church as well as the first woman to lead the Alabama-West Florida Conference delegation at General Conference. Harper Lee attended United Methodist-related Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1944, later transferring to the University of Alabama. “Her words resonate with evidence of personal and social holiness that reflect her Methodist heritage, which she held dear,” the Rev. J. Cameron West, Huntingdon’s president, said in a statement Friday. Lee attended law school, but chose writing as her career, working as an airline ticket agent in New York while making her first efforts at fiction in her spare time. Friends surprised her with a monetary gift that allowed her to focus fulltime on her writing, and “To Kill a Mockingbird” was the ultimate result. The novel references Methodism on the first page as it sketches the family background of the fictional Finch family at the center of the story. The second page mentions John Wesley, Methodism’s founder.

Mostly, the story is a coming-of-age tale in which a young daughter, Scout, observes her father, Atticus Finch, bravely challenge local racial mores by representing a black man falsely accused of rape. Prodding a nation After “To Kill a Mockingbird” came out in 1960, winning the Pulitzer Prize and becoming a popular film with Gregory Peck as Atticus, Lee published almost nothing for decades. Meanwhile, “To Kill a Mockingbird” would gradually become one of the all-time best-selling novels, not least because of its status as a staple of secondary school required reading lists. Last year, her novel “Go Set a Watchman” came out amid controversy over whether it represented a finished work or a less-accomplished draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” belatedly published for commercial reasons. This novel, whose title comes from a verse in Isaiah, also includes Methodist references. Atticus Finch is less noble in the second book, which is set in the 1950s as the civil rights movement grew and the U.S. Supreme Court ordered an end to segregated schools.

Harper Lee, author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ dies at 89 - The Boston Globe Advertisement Ms. Lee’s lawyer, Tonja B. Carter, had chanced upon it, attached to an original typescript of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” while looking through Ms. Lee’s papers, the publishers explained. It told the story of Atticus and his daughter, Jean Louise Finch, known as Scout, 20 years later, when Scout was a young woman living in New York. It included several scenes in which Atticus expresses conservative views on race relations seemingly at odds with his liberal stance in the earlier novel. The book was published in July with an initial printing of 2 million and, with enormous advance sales, immediately leapt to the top of the fiction bestseller lists, despite tepid reviews. “To Kill a Mockingbird” was really two books in one: a sweet, often humorous portrait of small-town life in the 1930s, and a sobering tale of race relations in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era.

Looking back on her childhood as a precocious tomboy, Scout, the narrator, evokes the sultry summers and simple pleasures of an ordinary small town in Alabama. At a time when Southern fiction inclined toward the Gothic, Ms. Lee, with a keen eye and a sharp ear for dialogue, presented “the more smiling aspects” of Southern life, to borrow a phrase from William Dean Howells. At the same time, her stark morality tale of a righteous Southern lawyer who stands firm against racism and mob rule struck a chord with Americans, many of them becoming aware of the civil rights movement for the first time. The novel had its critics. “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book,” Flannery O’Connor wrote in a letter to a friend shortly after the novel’s appearance. Some reviewers complained that the perceptions attributed to Scout were far too complex for a girl just starting grade school and dismissed Atticus as a kind of Southern Judge Hardy, dispensing moral bromides. The book soared miles above such criticisms.

By the late 1970s “To Kill a Mockingbird” had sold nearly 10 million copies, and in 1988 the National Council of Teachers of English reported that it was being taught in 74 percent of the nation’s secondary schools. ‘I never expected any sort of success with ‘‘Mockingbird.’’ ’ Harper Lee, to a radio interviewer in 1964 A decade later, Library Journal declared it the best novel of the 20th century. Nelle Harper Lee was born in the poky little town of Monroeville, in southern Alabama, the youngest of four children. “Nelle” was a backward spelling of her maternal grandmother’s first name, and Ms. Lee dropped it when “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published, out of fear that readers would pronounce it Nellie, which she hated. Her father, Asa Coleman Lee, was a prominent lawyer and the model for Atticus Finch, who shared his stilted diction and lofty sense of civic duty. Her mother, Frances Finch Lee, also known as Miss Fanny, was overweight and emotionally fragile. Truman Capote, a friend of Ms.

Lee’s from childhood, later said that Nelle’s mother had tried to drown her in the bathtub on two occasions, an assertion that Ms. Lee indignantly denied. Ms. Lee was a tough little tomboy who enjoyed beating up the local boys, climbing trees, and rolling in the dirt. “A dress on the young Nelle would have been as out of place as a silk hat on a hog,” recalled Marie Rudisill, Capote’s aunt, in her book “Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt Who Helped Raise Him.” One boy on the receiving end of Nelle’s thrashings was Truman Persons (later Capote), who spent several summers next door to Nelle with relatives. The two became fast friends, acting out adventures from “The Rover Boys” and, after Nelle’s father gave the two children an old Underwood typewriter, making up their own stories to dictate to each other. Capote later wrote Nelle into his first book, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” where she appears as the tomboy Idabel Tompkins. She made a repeat appearance as Ann Finchburg, nicknamed Jumbo, in his story “The Thanksgiving Visitor.” Ms.

Lee returned the favor, casting Capote in the role of the little blond tale-spinner Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Ms. Lee attended Huntingdon College, a local Methodist school for women, where she contributed occasional articles to the campus newspaper and two fictional vignettes to the college’s literary magazine. After a year at Huntingdon, Ms. Lee transferred to the University of Alabama to study law, primarily to please her father. Her own interests, and perhaps her disposition, led her elsewhere. After her senior year, she spent a summer at Oxford University as part of a student-exchange program. On her return from England, she decided to go to New York and become a writer. Ms. Lee arrived in Manhattan in 1949 and settled into a cold-water apartment in the East 80s. After working briefly at a bookstore, she found work as a reservations agent, first for Eastern Airlines and later for BOAC. At night she wrote on a desk made from a door. The local colony of displaced Southerners regarded her askance. “We didn’t think she was up to much,” recalled Louise Sims, the wife of the saxophonist Zoot Sims.

“She said she was writing a book, and that was that.” Editors at Lippincott told Ms. Lee that her manuscript read like a string of anecdotes, not a novel, but encouraged her to revise. Eventually they paid a small advance and assigned her to work with Tay Hohoff, an experienced editor with whom she developed a close working and personal relationship. Signs of its success were visible almost immediately after it was published in July 1960. Both Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild made the novel one of their selections, and Reader’s Digest selected it for publication in condensed form. A week after its publication, it jumped to the top of the bestseller lists; it remained there for 88 weeks. News of the rediscovery of “Go Set a Watchman” threw the literary world into turmoil. Many critics, as well as friends of Ms. Lee, found the timing and the rediscovery story suspicious, and openly questioned whether Ms. Lee, who was shielded from the press by Carter, was mentally competent to approve its publication.

It remained an open question, for many critics, whether “Go Set a Watchman” was anything more than the initial draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In a statement, Ms. Lee, who said that she had assumed the manuscript was lost, wrote, “After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication.” Top 10 Trending Articles NEA Big Read NEA Big Read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they’re quite different from people who must write. About the Author Harper Lee (1926-2016) If Nelle Harper Lee ever wanted proof that fame has its drawbacks, she didn't have to look farther than her childhood neighbor, Truman Capote. After her enormously successful first novel, she lived a life as private as Capote's was public. Nelle—her first name was her grandmother's spelled backward—was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama.

Her mother, Frances Cunningham Finch Lee, was a homemaker. Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, practiced law. Before A.C. Lee became a title lawyer, he once defended two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Both clients, a father and son, were hanged. As a child, Harper Lee was an unruly tomboy. She fought on the playground. She talked back to teachers. She was bored with school and resisted any sort of conformity. The character of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird would have liked her. In high school Lee was fortunate to have a gifted English teacher, Gladys Watson Burkett, who introduced her to challenging literature and the rigors of writing well. Lee loved nineteenth-century British authors best, and once said that her ambition was to become "the Jane Austen of south Alabama." Unable to fit in with the sorority she joined at the University of Alabama, she found a second home on the campus newspaper. Eventually she became editor-in-chief of the Rammer Jammer, a quarterly humor magazine on campus. She entered the law school, but she "loathed" it.

Despite her father's hopes that she would become a local attorney like her sister Alice, Lee went to New York to pursue her writing. She spent eight years working odd jobs before she finally showed a manuscript to Tay Hohoff, an editor at J.B. Lippincott. At this point, it still resembled a string of stories more than the novel that Lee had intended. Under Hohoff's guidance, the perspective was changed to Scout as a child, and two and a half years of rewriting followed. When the novel was finally ready for publication, the author opted for the name "Harper Lee" on the cover, because she didn't want to be misidentified as "Nellie." To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 to highly favorable reviews and quickly climbed the bestseller lists, where it remained for eighty-eight weeks. In 1961, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize. Lee later researched a book, similar to Capote's In Cold Blood (1966), about a part-time minister in Alexander City, Alabama, accused of killing five people for their insurance money and later himself murdered by a victim's relative. However, she dropped the project in the 1990s.

It wasn't until February of 2015 that news of a second novel surfaced, when Lee's publisher announced a newly discovered manuscript for Go Set a Watchman, the novel Lee wrote before To Kill a Mockingbird. In the meantime, To Kill a Mockingbird has sold more than thirty million copies in forty languages. In 2011, President Obama awarded her the National Medal of Arts. According to biographer Charles J. Shields, Lee was unprepared for the amount of personal attention associated with writing a bestseller. She led a quiet and guardedly private life. As Sheriff Tate says of Boo Radley, "draggin' him with his shy ways into the limelight—to me, that's a sin." So it would be with Harper Lee. The Friendship of Harper Lee and Truman Capote Nelle Harper Lee and Truman Capote became friends in the early 1930s as kindergarteners in Monroeville, Alabama. They lived next door to each other: Capote with aunts and uncles, Lee with her parents and three siblings. From the start they loved reading and recognized in each other "an apartness," as Capote later expressed it.

When Lee's father gave them an old Underwood typewriter, they began writing original stories. Although Capote moved to New York City in the third grade to join his mother and stepfather, he returned to Monroeville most summers, eventually providing the inspiration for Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1948 Capote published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Around that time, Lee quit law school and joined Capote in New York to work at becoming a writer, too. Years of menial jobs followed until To Kill a Mockingbird was ready for publication. Capote read the manuscript and made editorial suggestions. She, in her turn, accompanied him to Kansas to help research In Cold Blood. After To Kill a Mockingbird was published, Capote resented Lee's success. He could have tried harder to dispel baseless rumors that the novel was as much his work as hers. Their friendship continued during the 1960s and '70s, but Capote's drug and alcohol abuse strained the relationship. Later he would stop publishing and sink into self-parody, sponging off high society and making endless rounds of the talk-show circuit.

When Capote died in 1984, Lee confided to friends that she hadn't heard from him in years. Get involved with NEA Big Read! Mockingbird, Inc. | New Republic Mockingbird, Inc. By William Giraldi August 5, 2015 When it was announced in February that a “newly discovered” Harper Lee novel was soon to be published, there followed the expected gale of media giddiness, the widespread convulsions of joy, a gyrating and ejaculating all across the web. Pulling up alongside the jubilant ones were the judicious ones, those who questioned how the publication of Lee’s new-old novel, Go Set a Watchman, came to pass: how the publicity-shyest author on earth, she who resolved never to publish another novel after her spirit was jolted by the galactic success of her debut, she who fled Manhattan half of every year for the asylum of her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, how this monastically private writer agreed—in her eighty-ninth year, post-stroke, confined to an assisted-living establishment—to bless the reading world with what was the first, failed draft of To Kill a Mockingbird.

During the initial sortie of coverage in February, a Newsweek headline bellowed "Friends Say Harper Lee Was Manipulated," but you didn’t need that deflating headline or any other because you already had those unignorable inner murmurs—they were your conscience saying that something is rotten in Monroeville. On February 3, HarperCollins posted a press release that relayed how Ms. Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter, had recently discovered the manuscript “in a secure location.” There’s also a statement attributed to Ms. Lee that reads, in part: “I hadn’t realized it had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.” Those crafty touches—“much thought and hesitation,” “my dear friend,” “people I trust”—are trying a tad too hard, wouldn’t you say? The spotlight-shunning Lee is “amazed” that she will once again be subjected to a freshet of attention, the very soaking she’d organized her life to avoid.

The only thing amazing here is the expectation that literate people would be hoodwinked by attributed language that bears the unmistakable hallmarks of subterfuge. In HarperCollins’s press release, Michael Morrison, whose title is the dizzying caravan “President and Publisher of Harper-Collins U.S. General Books Group and Canada,” believes, in lines that manage to be both tautological and cliché-sodden, that Watchman is “a brilliant book” and a “masterpiece” that “will be revered for generations to come.” Jonathan Burnham, senior vice president and publisher of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, believes that Watchman “is a remarkable literary event,” although he obviously means publishing event: big difference. In early June, Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp., the parent company of HarperCollins, dubbed Watchman a “fascinating, captivating, important book”—I bet he did—and then added: “It’s the most preordered book in HarperCollins’s history,” a non sequitur to anyone but a CEO of a global corporation. Listening to businessmen hold forth about literature constitutes a rare kind of comedy.

Novelists don’t forget the larval stages of their books—they are usually bad enough to brand themselves onto memory. Harper Lee appears to have had only the most marginal input on the publication of the book that will bear her name. The New York Times reported that Burnham “had never spoken directly to Ms. Lee about the book and had communicated solely through her lawyer, Ms. Carter, and her literary agent, Andrew Nurnberg.” The lawyer-agent pas de deux: Speaking solely to them and not once to the author of the book he was buying is rather like consulting the egrets while ignoring the hippo. Burnham also said that he was “completely confident” that Ms. Lee had consented to the publication of Watchman—of course he was. Consulting the novelist “wasn’t necessary,” he said, and you see why the presidential wings of corporations continue to enjoy such glowing reputations. Writes the Times: “The statement Ms. Lee provided expressing her delight that the new novel will finally be published was delivered through her lawyer, Mr. Burnham said.” That lawyer again. Will finally be published. Novelists don’t forget the larval stages of their books—they are usually bad enough to brand themselves onto memory.

If Lee had wanted the world to hold Watchman, she had decades of good health in which to unearth it from whatever bottom drawer she’d buried it in, and if she’d thought it lost, all she had to do was look. On July 2, the Times compromised the official party line with ripe information about Watchman and Carter. In February, Carter had told the Times that she “was so stunned” by the discovery she’d just made, but, as the Times reported: The discovery may have happened years earlier, in October 2011, when Justin Caldwell, a rare books expert from Sotheby’s auction house, flew to Alabama to meet with Ms. Carter and Samuel Pinkus, then Ms. Lee’s literary agent, to appraise a Mockingbird manuscript for insurance and other purposes. That inspection happened in a bank—fitting when you consider the cash that was going to be made by what everyone saw in that vault.

The Times reported Carter’s claim that she didn’t see anything and was “sent from the room to run an errand before review of any of the materials occurred.” Both Pinkus and Caldwell affirm that Carter was indeed there when they found Watchman in 2011, according to the Times. HarperCollins responded by saying that the company believed Carter’s version of events—of course it does. It has millions of reasons to believe it. About the Sotheby’s visit in 2011, Carter has “declined to answer additional questions”—of course she has. Harper Lee, circa 1950. Michael Brown/HarperCollins If Ms.

Lee had in sound mind consented to the publication of Watchman, speculated the Times, it would mean “an abrupt turnaround for an author who had said she did not intend to publish another work and then, late in life, agreed to venture out with a book that had initially been dismissed as an ambitious but disjointed first draft.” Abrupt turnaround is one way to put it, I suppose, and that use of “late in life” might be courteous, but it rather deemphasizes what we’re talking about here: an octogenarian about to turn nonagenarian, post-stroke, who, by her own sister’s admission, cannot see or hear. (Alice Lee, the counsel and caretaker who steadfastly bodyguarded her sister’s interests, died just three months before the announcement of Watchman.) In April, functionaries in Alabama found Lee capable of making her own publishing decisions, but regarding the competence and incorruptibility of functionaries, you might want to call upon your own experience with them.

In a shady, bad-faith move, HarperCollins placed “the strictest of embargoes” on Watchman: With a few exceptions—cherry-picked, one guesses, for the safety of their pedestrianism—the publisher wouldn’t release advanced copies to the critical community. Strictest of embargoes? Are we talking about a book here, or plutonium? They’ll no doubt maintain that they didn’t want the book to leak online before publication, but no publisher wants any book to leak online before publication. So as the lot of us waited, with the rest of the world, until the July 14 release date, there seemed little else to do but return to the novel upon which the current commotion depends. It hasn’t happened often, but when an American novel becomes a beloved cultural institution, and you wish to reread the novel afresh, unhindered by the easy familiarity of that institution, then you somehow must shut out the choric approval while mustering a fairly potent state of amnesia.

It helps if you’ve never seen the Oscar-earning film or the stage production, as I haven’t, and if you didn’t register your middle-school teacher’s well-meaning but puerile pronouncements, as I didn’t. Just how good is To Kill a Mockingbird? You know about the plot, the two-part architecture: the Wordsworthian childhood sublime of Scout, Jem, and Dill, their summertime beguilement by Boo Radley; followed by Atticus Finch’s defense of the wrongly accused black man, Tom Robinson. And you know about the rabid popularity: the novel’s pervasiveness in American middle and high schools, its still robust yearly sales figures, the manifold efforts to ban it—efforts that always achieve the inverse effect. The narration of Mockingbird belongs to the adult Jean Louise; the eyes, however, belong wholly to the child Scout. Jean Louise Finch is consistently shrewd: “I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergy-men”—with that sentence and others, you see you aren’t dealing with an obedient and blindly pious Southern woman. And Scout: the ceaseless charisma and comedic lean of that little girl.

I imagine every reader must have his Scout moment, the paragraph or line in which she does or says something after which he is helplessly hers: He’ll follow her not only to the end of her book but to the end of the earth. For me it happens in chapter seven (a bit later than most, maybe): “The second grade was grim.” Illustration by Melinda Josie An unsigned Time magazine review in 1960 saw that “Lee’s prose has an edge that cuts through cant,” and that’s well put. Mockingbird is rich with fluvial prose: “The night-crawlers had retired, but ripe chinaberries drummed on the roof when the wind stirred, and the darkness was desolate with the barking of distant dogs.” See the expertly placed and surprising adverb here: “The remains of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard.” Notice the melic rhythm of this line: “We bounded down the sidewalk on a spree of sheer relief, leaping and howling.” For a novel of almost 400 pages, it’s blessedly inoculated against common prose germs.

There is only the occasional cough of cliché: “snow white,” “ramrod straight,” “blaze of glory.” As some novelists know better than others, keeping paragraphs free of knee-jerk jargon and toneless formulations is the work of round-the-clock vigilance, and Harper Lee has always deserved more applause for the stride of her style. You won’t find much literary comment on Mockingbird, and what does exist doesn’t much care about how Lee carpenters her prose. A smattering of early critics and reviewers were irked by the plot’s bifurcation. The New York Herald Tribune complained: “The charm and wistful humor of the childhood recollections do not foreshadow the deeper, harsher note which pervades the later pages of the book.” That goes out of its way to miss the point, since the first act of the novel is the crucial imaginative prelude to the moral reckoning of the second act: The childhood sublime must be celebrated if its later defacing by adulthood horrors, its asphyxiation by injustice and race hatred, is to have any effect. Since the appearance of Mockingbird in 1960, some have had a hard time taking it seriously.

In a letter to a friend in October of that year, Flannery O’Connor had this to say: “For a child’s book it does all right. It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book.” I’m loath ever to be at odds with Ms. O’Connor, but I’ve got to say: Those lines hit my ear as distinctly bitter. The one word that shows her hand? Buying. Those most qualified to comment upon Mockingbird chose not to do so. James Baldwin lived 27 more years after Mockingbird was published, and nowhere in his collected essays or in any interview I could find does he see fit even to mention it. Ralph Ellison lived another 34 years after Mockingbird was published, and nowhere in all 900 pages of his collected essays does he see fit to mention it either. Likewise in Edmund Wilson’s final journal—not a peep.

In fact, upon the novel’s publication and in the ensuing decades, the best American critical minds seemed not to know that it existed—Granville Hicks, at one time a relevant critic, gave it three short paragraphs in the Saturday Review, and in the 1990s, Harold Bloom penned an abbreviated introduction. Even John Updike, who in six dreadnoughts and one slimmer volume of literary criticism hardly leaves a necessary book untouched, says nothing of it. Truman Capote’s endorsement of his friend’s book read: “Someone rare has written this very fine first novel, a writer with the liveliest sense of life, and the warmest, most authentic humor. A touching book, and so funny, so likable”—a somewhat neutered statement for Capote, redundant if true, and perhaps worth as much as any blurb. In 1966, a scholar with the unimprovable name of W.J. Stuckey impugned Lee for Mockingbird’s mobilizing of the child’s perspective in an adult’s language, tagging it a “rhetorical trick,” which gives those two terms quite a workout.

“Whenever she gets into difficulties with one point of view,” wrote Stuckey, “she switches to the other”—but the point of view doesn’t switch, not in the way Stuckey suggests. As in the early books of Wordsworth’s Prelude, where the child’s vista is crooned in a poet’s tongue, the sophisticated Jean Louise Finch is free to summon and animate the Scout who breathes in her still. I don’t claim that as the ideal execution for a novel, nor that the liabilities of doing so aren’t legion, only that Lee’s method is consistent: There’s no clumsy juggling of the sort Stuckey perceives. His suspicion is warranted but his diagnosis is wrong: One great flaw of Mockingbird is not an inconsistent point of view, but the fact that Scout can’t be the moral agent of her own story, an honor which goes to her father. That remains one of the pestering inevitabilities of the child-as-protagonist: Morality isn’t yet fully codified because apprehension and language are both constricted, which is precisely why so many child narrators must be cast as prodigies of verbiage and perception.

Scout isn’t cast as that—she’s not a child narrator and she’s not a prodigy. She’s an astute kid who can often apprehend the world’s oscillation from beauty to injustice and back again, but the deepest seeing comes from the adult Jean Louise Finch: It is she who narrates Mockingbird, not her girlhood self, even though that girlhood self is the plot’s kindly tyrant. Bloom puts it this way: “The crises of [Scout’s] book confirm her in her intrinsic strength and goodness, without wounding her sensibility or modifying her view of reality”—there’s the crux of the problem, and a problem not limited to Scout. In 1957, the title of the book suggested by Lee’s first agent was Atticus, and you have no trouble seeing why: The portrait of Atticus Finch is a hymn of love to Harper Lee’s father, an attorney who in 1919 tried unsuccessfully to defend two black men from charges of murder.

If Atticus strikes you as bloodless and wooden, that’s because he’s mostly a walking soapbox for moralistic bromides, incapable of talking to anyone without unburdening himself of some principled platitude. (Stuckey refers to the novel’s “simplistic moral,” to its being “self-consciously cute.”) It’s true that Atticus snaps to life in the courtroom while defending Tom Robinson—and it’s thrilling to watch him work on behalf of truth, even when you know the truth won’t matter—but that’s because the courtroom presents the perfect forum for his naturally grand exhortations. Atticus never suspects that his true moral duty might be to marshal an intolerance of intolerance. The book’s superego, Atticus contains equal parts preternatural tolerance and rigid composure; he’s always hyperaware of showing his children all the upstanding ways to behave. Ever sunny toward the organic goodness of humanity—and ever Christic: “I do my best to love everybody,” he tells Scout—Atticus never suspects that his true moral duty might be to marshal an intolerance of intolerance. The day after Scout disperses the lynch mob on the steps of the jail, Atticus tells her and Jem that the leader, Mr.

Cunningham, is “basically a good man … he just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.” That good man was about to murder an innocent human being—that’s quite a blind spot. The socially awakened Jem doesn’t let his father get away with such poltroon babble: “Don’t call that a blind spot,” he says. “He’da killed you last night.” A vigilante and a bigot, Mr. Cunningham is not a good man, and Atticus’s refusal to say so, his refusal to acknowledge how the cretinous turn murderous, amounts to something of an intellectual crime. He has all the right motions of the principled man but none of the fed-up disgust required to assault the toxic tropisms of an entire segment of our society. His courage is laudable—and never more so than on the steps of the jail when he blocks the lynch mob from reaching Tom Robinson—but without the stamina of a mobilizing conviction, courage counts for little, a mere gesture. This is part of what Mark Twain means by: “We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.” If there’s such a thing as a passive martyr, Atticus is it.

Scout is frequently coupled with Huckleberry Finn—Twain’s influence on Lee was paramount—but look instead at Atticus and Huck, because Atticus is the moral nucleus of Mockingbird just as Huck is of his story. Huck’s decision not to give up the slave Jim to the authorities, and to consign himself to hellfire as a result, is the transformative moment in American consciousness: After that display of mercy, of moral fearlessness, nothing can ever be the same. So if it’s morally feel-good fiction we’re looking for, you’d think we could do no better than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But we don’t have the same sentimental attachment to Twain’s nation-shaking novel as we do to Mockingbird for the simple reason that Twain’s book isn’t sentimental. What Huck does takes much more courage than what Atticus does: Huck puts his own freedom in jeopardy—Atticus just follows his assignment. “Every lawyer gets at least one case in his lifetime that affects him personally,” he tells Scout. “This one’s mine, I guess.” Well, all right—but being affected is the least one should expect.

Where are the spiritual upheavals of this man, the vital defilements of his composure? Huckleberry Finn isn’t feel-good because it demands action of us: It petitions us for sacrifice, and the typical American would rather not consider that. Mockingbird, meanwhile, doesn’t ask us for anything so lofty: Just sit back and be charmed by that little girl, be pleased by the rectitude of her father. Loving and lauding Mockingbird assuages our self-blame, and in doing so, absolves us of responsibility. It feels downright correct to cherish this novel—it feels, come to think of it, rather like an honest day’s work. It performs its magic first by suctioning itself to your own nostalgia and then by satisfying your limp conscience: As long as there are Atticuses in the world, all will be well, and you yourself can remain recumbent. We Americans prefer our morality reductive, and so the easily sloganized ethics of Mockingbird were and remain palatable for millions.

“Murder,” wrote Graham Greene, “if you are going to treat it seriously at all, is a religious subject,” and what are we talking about at the hub of Mockingbird if not murder? I’ve never believed that Tom Robinson was killed trying to escape from the prison yard. Seventeen bullet wounds aren’t needed to keep a man from climbing a fence. “They didn’t have to shoot him that much,” Atticus says, but he undergoes no religious quandary, no spiritual attrition, no weakening of his selfhood: He’s dutifully upright and, in the end, perfectly acquiescent. Toni Morrison dismissed the novel as a “white savior” story, except that Atticus fails at saving Tom Robinson. Jean Louise Finch says: “In the secret courts of men’s hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed”—but those secret inner courts aren’t so secret. When Mr.

Raymond, the town’s pretend drunk, appears outside the courthouse with the children, he speaks of “the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people, too.” And after the trial, Atticus tell his children this: “There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins. They’re ugly, but those are the facts of life.” As we had to witness recently with George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, and with Darren Wilson and Michael Brown, those ugly facts from the 1930s have proven their loathsome durability, except in those cases we didn’t have the words of the black men (boys, really) because they’d been shot dead. Go Set a Watchman is being published during a summer when the wounds of Ferguson still suppurate, when the city of Chicago is a weekly hecatomb, when ashes still darken the air of Baltimore, when a South Carolina police officer awaits trial for the on-camera killing of Walter Scott.

It took an imbecilic warp (I will not utter his name) assassinating nine peaceful human beings at a church in Charleston in June for South Carolina’s leaders to sprout a conscience and pack up an omnibigoted and insurrectionist flag—a nauseating cost. That butcher, by the way, repeated the same inherited and scurrilous falsehood that dooms Tom Robinson in Mockingbird: “You rape our women,” he reportedly said before opening fire. In the aftermath of the Charleston disaster, we saw, as we’ve seen again and again across history, the coming together of the decent and the loving and the determined—we saw that the depths to which the depraved can sink will always be outshone by the heights to which the humane can rise. Near the end of Mockingbird, in a line that reveals what she’s known all along, Scout tells her brother: “I think there’s just one kind of folks.

Folks.” And Jem says: “I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo Radley’s stayed shut up in the house all this time … it’s because he wants to stay inside”—because it’s hard to be alive, because the world is both too hideous and too sublime for a soul that sensitive. When Hemingway’s unfinished novel True at First Light was published in 1999, we saw a brood of editorials and essays about the ethics of publishing it, about what the author might think of the tarnishing caused by a lusterless draft he wouldn’t have let anyone glimpse. Some Hemingway disciples were irked and hurt on behalf of the once heroic craftsman, but that irk and hurt seem somewhat mirthful when you compare it to what crowds of readers felt this summer on behalf of Harper Lee. Hemingway had been dead nearly four decades when True at First Light appeared—Harper Lee is still alive. According to Charles J.

Shields’s biography, in January of 1957, Lee went to see her agent, Maurice Crain, with “the first 50 pages of a novel, Go Set a Watchman.” A week later, she was back again, this time with a hundred more pages. From then on, she dropped off about 50 new pages with Crain every week through the end of February. Two months of back-and-forth revisions followed between author and agent until, in early May, Crain judged that the manuscript was in suitable shape to send out. But he had never liked the title Go Set a Watchman. Crain sent the book to the publisher J.P. Lippincott. Tay Hohoff, the editor, later said of that draft: “It was more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel,” but she was interested enough to give Lee a contract. After Lee rewrote the book based on Hohoff’s suggestions, the next draft “was better. It wasn’t right. … There were dangling threads of plot, there was a lack of unity.” It then took another two and a half years to make what we know now as To Kill a Mockingbird.

That “series of anecdotes” with the “dangling threads of plot” and “lack of unity”? That’s the book the world is reading this summer. In a conscious confusion of purity for quality, HarperCollins boasted that they were publishing Watchman unedited—as if they could have done anything else, short of rewriting it themselves: The author cannot see or hear. The story is slender: Jean Louise Finch, now 26 years old and living in New York, trains home to Maycomb, Alabama, to visit her ailing, 72-year-old father, Atticus Finch, and her childhood love and maybe future husband, Henry (Hank) Clinton. Her brother, Jem, so beloved by readers of Mockingbird, has died of the same heart calamity that felled their mother. There follow sedating, brochurelike stretches about the history of the county and the town, and numbing banter between Jean Louise and her Aunt Alexandra. Then Jean Louise finds a booklet on her father’s lamp table, The Black Plague, the cover of which shows a drawing of “an anthropophagous Negro.” Incensed, she rushes off to the courthouse where Atticus and Henry are taking part in a citizens’ council meeting.

Hidden in the balcony—you’ll be reminded of how the children sat in that very balcony in Mockingbird—she eavesdrops on a cataract of white-power propaganda, of which her father and sweetheart seem to approve. She then spends the rest of the book obnoxiously outraged, flitting about with the affectations of an adolescent who’s just discovered the idealism of social justice. Just as she’s about to leave town for good, her Uncle Jack backhands her in the mouth and feeds her whiskey, and this, against everything you know about human behavior, brings Jean Louise straight back to her senses. After an epic unloading of casuistry by both her father and her Uncle Jack, Jean Louise appears to accept that Maycomb’s new white-on-black animus isn’t really bigotry, just (white) citizens rightly concerned about their own heritage and not keen on Washington or the NAACP meddling in their self-governance. If you could further pollute Donald Trump with the blather of Ayn Rand, you’d have someone who looks a lot like the Atticus Finch of Go Set a Watchman.

Ponderous and lurching, haltingly confected, the novel plods along in search of a plot, tranquilizes you with vast fallow patches, with onslaughts of cliché and dialogue made of pamphleteering monologue or else eye-rolling chitchat. You are confronted by entire pages of her Uncle Jack’s oracular prattle, and you must machete through the bracken of listless, throwaway prose in order to get to a memorable turn of phrase. “Jean Louise smiled to herself” and “Jean Louise laughed aloud” and then “Jean Louise shook her head.” Someone has “green envy,” and someone else “worked night and day,” while someone “dropped dead in his tracks.” Soon, “Henry looked at her,” and then “she looked at him,” and then “Hank stirred” before “she stirred.” Characters “raise” their “eyebrows” so often you have to question how their foreheads turned into trampolines. When Jean Louise gets upset, which is always, her “throat tightens,” and you wonder how she breathes through such frequent esophageal constriction.

Some good prose survived the voyage from Watchman to Mockingbird—Aunt Alexandra’s corset “drew up her bosom to giddy heights”—and you turn pages praying to find more of it. Those prayers, like all prayers, aren’t answered. It’s impossible to believe that a sound Harper Lee wished for this thing to be published. For once, none of those flaws in the novel can be blamed on the author: She was learning how to write when she composed Watchman and wasn’t able to ready this draft for publication. In the two and a half years it took her to turn this mess into To Kill a Mockingbird, she evolved beautifully as a stylist and storyteller, helped along by an astute editor. It’s impossible to believe that a sound Harper Lee wished for this thing to be published, impossible to believe that her sister-protector, Alice Lee, would have allowed it to happen. This befouling book does not come close to meeting the immoderate predictions of its publisher (a “masterpiece” that “will be revered for generations to come”). It should have been permitted to retain its quiet dignity boxed in the author’s archives.

The manuscript might have been mildly nourishing for future tweeds in search of tenure, but it should never have been expensively packaged, gaudily hyped, and unscrupulously employed as chum to lure lovers of Mockingbird. The challenge for a white author with a racial subject is to be on the side of truth while skirting the exploitation of stereotype—and in both Mockingbird and Watchman, Lee’s response to that challenge isn’t always applaudable: Her stereotypes can be white when they aren’t black. What Bloom said of Mockingbird cannot be said of Watchman: “The book is refreshingly free of ideologies and of the need to revise history to suit some particular politics of the spirit.” Watchman contains no moment that can match the tremendous affection, the familiarity and inevitability of when in Mockingbird Scout is at last able to say to her mysterious neighbor: “Hey, Boo.” Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in “the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,” as Percy Shelley put it in a different context. And futurity, I’m certain, will forgive Go Set a Watchman. I’m not at all certain that it will forgive those who conspired to sell it to us.

William Giraldi is a contributing editor at the New Republic. Read More Sign up for your daily dose of politics, culture, and big ideas. Sign Up Harper Lee 'Mockingbird' sequel on the way FacebookEmail Twitter Google+ LinkedIn Pinterest Harper Lee 'Mockingbird' sequel on the way NEW YORK (AP) — "To Kill a Mockingbird" will not be Harper Lee's only published book after all. Publisher Harper announced Tuesday that "Go Set a Watchman," a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed Post to Facebook Harper Lee 'Mockingbird' sequel on the way NEW YORK (AP) — "To Kill a Mockingbird" will not be Harper Lee's only published book after all. Publisher Harper announced Tuesday that "Go Set a Watchman," a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed Check out this story on USATODAY.com: CancelSend A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Posted! A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. 42 To find out more about Facebook commenting please read the Conversation Guidelines and FAQs Harper Lee 'Mockingbird' sequel on the way Ann Oldenburg , USA TODAY 4:34 p.m.

EST February 3, 2015 Harper Lee on Aug. 20, 2007. (Photo: Rob Carr, AP) Big book news! A new (old) Harper Lee novel is coming this summer. It will be the author's first new work in more than 50 years. Publisher Harper announced Tuesday that Go Set a Watchman, a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed in the 1950s and put aside, will be released July 14. It's essentially a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, although it was finished before that classic, reports AP. Fans overjoyed that Harper Lee is publishing a 'To Kill a Mockingbird' sequel The publisher plans a first printing of 2 million copies. "In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called 'Go Set a Watchman,' " the 88-year-old Lee said in a statement issued by Harper. "It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I thought it a pretty decent effort.

My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout's childhood, persuaded me to write a novel (what became To Kill a Mockingbird) from the point of view of the young Scout. "I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn't realized it (the original book) had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years." According to the publisher, Carter came upon the manuscript at a "secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird." The new book is set in Lee's Maycomb, Ala., during the mid-1950s, 20 years after To Kill a Mockingbird. "Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus," says the publisher's announcement.

"She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father's attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood." (Photo: USA TODAY) Lee, who still lives in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., has rarely spoken since the 1960s and the publisher says she isn't likely to do a publicity tour for this book. To Kill a Mockingbird is among the most beloved novels in history, with sales topping 40 million copies. It was released on July 11, 1960, won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a 1962 movie starring Gregory Peck in an Oscar-winning performance as attorney Atticus Finch.

Question: What is the title of the novel published this year that was originally the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird?
Answer: GO SET A WATCHMAN