“To Kill a Mockingbird” Author to Release a Sequel

Published at 11:05 am, February 3, 2015

EastIdahoNews.com Staff

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — It took more than 50 years, but author Harper Lee will release a sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning book To Kill a Mockingbird, first published in 1960.

Lee’s publisher, Harper, announced on Tuesday that Go Set a Watchman will be released on July 14. Though presented as a sequel set some 20 years later, the book was actually written before To Kill a Mockingbird.

“In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called Go Set a Watchman,” Lee, now 88, said in a statement. “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.”

Scout is the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Lee continued, “I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn’t realized it [the first 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.”

Go Set a Watchman follows Scout as she returns to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama, in the mid-1950s, after living in New York.

“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,” the publisher’s announcement reads.

Harper will initially print two million copies of the 304-page book, which will also be made available in e-book format. Harper says the manuscript will be published exactly as Lee wrote it, without alterations or revisions.

To Kill a Mockingbird was made into a 1962 film starring Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar for his role as Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, a staunchly ethical attorney in Maycomb in the 1930s, who unsuccessfully defends a black man against false charges he raped a white woman.

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