Pulitzer-winning author Harper Lee has announced she will publish a sequel to her famous first novel To Kill A Mockingbird after a 55-year hiatus.
The novel will be called Go Set A Watchman and will take place twenty years after the events of To Kill A Mockingbird.
Lee, now aged 88, wrote To Kill A Mockingbird as a new author in her early ‘30s. Thought to be the first novel she had ever written, To Kill A Mockingbird was met with worldwide acclaim. It sold over 40 million copies, won her a prestigious Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for film.
It turns out, however, that To Kill A Mockingbird was her second novel. It was a prequel written on the advice of her publishers after she showed them another novel featuring the same characters, called Go Set A Watchman.
Lee followed her publisher’s guidance, abandoned her original manuscript and wrote To Kill A Mockingbird instead.
Now, almost 6 decades later, the original Go Set A Watchman manuscript has resurfaced and will be published later this year. To Kill A Mockingbird will finally get its sequel.
The 500-page sequel will be published by Harper Collins and will be released on July 14, 2015. It is set in Maycomb, Alabama, where Scout has returned home to visit her father Atticus Finch.
“I hadn’t realised it had survived,” Lee said.
“So was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it.
Lee said she is “humbled and amazed” that the sequel will finally be published after being lost for so long.
This is how Lee describes the events that led to Go Set A Watchman being lost and then found again:
“In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called Go Set A Watchman. 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,” she said in a statement today.
“I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn’t realized it (the original book) had survived.”
References to the novel have been discovered in the 55 years since it was written, for example by Lee’s biographer Charles Shields, but it was always assumed to be the title of an early draft of To Kill A Mockingbird. Until now, no one but Lee and her original publishers knew the classic had a sequel.
Harper Collins described the sequel’s plot in a statement:
“Scout has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus. She is forced to grapple with issuesboth 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 andspent her childhood.”
Jonathon Burnham, a publisher with Harper Collins, described the sequel as a “remarkable literary event”.
“The existence of Go Set A Watchman was unknown until recently, and its discovery is an extraordinary gift to the many readers and fans of To Kill A Mockingbird,” he said.