The day that literary fans have eagerly awaited has finally come with the announcement that Harper Lee, reclusive author of the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, will publish her second book, a sequel to her award-winning first book, later this year.
The book, titled Go Set a Watchman, will feature an adult Scout and will be set in the 1950s in the same semi-fictitious town of Maycomb, Alabama. Interestingly, the time period of the book will be roughly the same setting as the era in which Lee actually wrote the book, as Watchman was written before Mockingbird and put aside.
As fate would have it, Lee’s publisher was originally taken with the childhood stories the adult Scout was telling in the manuscript for Watchman, and thus the book that readers around the world have come to love was born. By some accounts, the original manuscript for Mockingbird also did not include any mention of the chilling Tom Robinson case, but that the author revised the book and used the infamous case as the catalyst for many of the events in the book.
The saga of the Watchman manuscript is almost as intense as any work of bestselling fiction can be. The manuscript was found in a secure location at HarperCollins’ offices, apparently paperclipped to a typed copy of Mockingbird’s manuscript. When the publisher became aware that this was actually the original story that Lee had penned, the deal for publication eventually followed.
Go Set a Watchman will be released in the US on July 14th, but hopefully devoted ebook fans will not have to wait as long for the digital edition of this book as they did for the ebook of Mockingbird, which was released July 8, 2014, some fifty-four years after its original publication.
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.