Though Harper Lee’s “Go Set A Watchman” won’t be released until midnight Tuesday, anxious readers are watching the clock as they wait for pre-ordered copies or add their names to waiting lists at local libraries. I don’t know if that’s true. They love this book.
Advertisement
The book purportedly portrays Atticus Finch, the moral hero of “Mockingbird“, as a racist.
Each location will open at 7am on Tuesday, July 14, in connection with Go Set a Watchman’s release. She had been going through Lee’s safe-deposit box after hearing her family talk about a possible second novel.
Lee, now 89, appeared to have joined the literary club that includes Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” and Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” when she stepped away from publishing and public life shortly after the release of her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel in 1960. “Watchman” was then set aside and apparently forgotten.
The new novel, like the old, is told from the point of view of Scout Finch.
But questions have been raised all along about the quality of the book, completed when Lee was a young and unpublished writer and received coolly by publishers, and whether the 89-year-old Lee was fully aware of the planned release.
She is also raising the possibility of a third book by the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird“, a suggestion challenged by a leading biographer. The case was settled with Lee regaining rights to the book, but her complaint said she was incapable of signing documents because of macular degeneration, “which makes it hard for her to read documents not printed in very large type”.
After moving north from the Deep South, Jean Louise recognizes that Maycomb residents are slow to accept progressive ideals: “Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South’s political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican”, she says. The Alabama Securities Commission investigated allegations of elder abuse but found no reason to intervene.
News of the new book’s publication stunned the literary world earlier this year and concerns were raised about the extent of Lee’s involvement in the project. She is a lifelong Harper Lee fan, and named her daughter, age 6, after the author.
The first chapter was issued Friday (July 10).
Advertisement
Unlike those authors, Lee – however reclusive – is still alive, making “Watchman” unprecedented. “If a trilogy was planned, why didn’t Lee, her editor, and her agent turn their attention to that manuscript?”
