“Watchman” opens with Jean Louise (Scout’s real name) returning home to visit Maycomb. A significant aspect of this novel is that it asks us to see Atticus now not merely as a hero, a god, but as a flesh-and-blood man with shortcomings and moral failings – and in so doing enables us to see ourselves for all our complexities and contradictions. The evocative imagery pulls the reader back to the world of To Kill A Mockingbird, although in the first pages we are abruptly introduced to the death of a much-loved character.
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Merchandise manager Alex Ruston said Barnes & Noble will be giving away “Go Set a Watchman” tote bags to the first 20 customers who purchase a copy, and everyone who comes into the store between 7 a.m. and 10 am. will receive a free coffee. “You can’t trust anyone anymore”.
There are some changes to the history of the Finch family that cause a rupture in the ongoing narrative for readers who know “Mockingbird”: the case of the black man, Tom Robinson, falsely accused of rape, but found guilty nonetheless, is transmuted to become the case of a black man acquitted for sexual congress with a white woman – an encounter that was revealed to have been consensual. He invokes the Declaration of Independence during the trial and argues for the sanctity of the legal system.
I know the feeling.
Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter, has said she stumbled upon the work past year.
HarperCollins has reported that preorders for “Watchman” are the highest in company history, and Amazon.com has announced that the novel’s preorders are the strongest since the last “Harry Potter” story, which came out in 2007.
“In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called “Go Set a Watchman,”‘ Lee said in a statement issued by Harper in February”. Organizers also are planning walking tours around Monroeville, which serves as the model for the fictional town of Maycomb in both books.
“My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout”. With regards to that, there is a claim to be made that what was discovered was in fact just a collection of stories from previous drafts that Lee never intended to rework, and now they are being released.
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Unfortunately there is no answer to that question yet. The manuscript for the upcoming novel was allegedly right there the whole time which brings some speculation by itself since it is hard to believe that a publishable manuscript from Lee was just resting in her archive for over sixty years. She was apparently amazed at its existence after all of these years. It is not inconceivable that the people close to her are not necessarily looking out for her best interests, and the timing of her sister’s death and the reveal of the new novel provides a spark to this notion. How autobiographical is “Watchman”, which roughly follows the path of Lee’s life in the 1950s? “She got a job as an airline reservationist at Eastern Airlines”, Shields says, “and she wrote at night and on the weekends while working as a reservationist for about eight years”. Around the time Lee was working on “Watchman”, an essay by Nobel laureate William Faulkner was published in Life magazine. The Supreme Court had ruled unanimously in 1954 that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955 led to the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott. So I would say to the NAACP and all the organizations who would compel immediate and unconditional integration ‘Go slow now.
