Posted on 02/03/2015 1:05:31 PM PST by Brad from Tennessee
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed, “There are no second acts in American lives,” but Harper Lee is out to prove him wrong.
The beloved author will publish her second novel this summer. “Go Set a Watchman” was written more than 50 years ago — before her Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird” — but it was never published.
In a statement released this morning, the 88-year-old author explained that when she was just starting off, she wrote “Go Set a Watchman” about a woman nicknamed Scout who returns home to Maycomb to visit her father, Atticus. After reading the manuscript, her editor asked her to rewrite the story from the point of view of Scout as a child. “I was a first-time writer,” Lee said, “so I did as I was told.” The result was “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a novel that has sold 40 million copies since it was first published in 1960.
The original story, “Go Set a Watchman,” was forgotten. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Neither did Margaret Mitchell for Gone with the Wind. Some people only have one story in them.
The thing that is amazing is that she still makes thousands of dollars a day in royalties for that one book. It was so well received that she has a net worth close to forty million dollars and only wrote the one published novel over fifty years ago.
Just kind of blows ones mind.
I’ll buy a copy.
If you write one of the best novels of the century, you wil also be a millionaire.
It makes me rethink the jokes about “one hit wonders”!
Truman Capote wrote another novel? :)
I can only imagine what the estate of Margaret Mitchell rakes in. Both are wonderful books.
Interesting.
Is there any evidence of it?
I am not attacking you, I just find the idea plausible and I never thought of it before.
Yup, J. D. Salinger had basically two books/stories One about Holden Caulfield - The Catcher in the Rye the other about The Glass Family "Franny and Zoey" "Raise High The Roofbeam Carpenters" (my favorite) "Seymour: An Introduction" etc. which weren't full blown novels but novellas and short stories which if you put them all together still wouldn't be as big as one of Stephen King's larger books.
The last Documentary I saw on him called Salinger Said there will be several books published in the near future and most of them are on either about Holden Caulfield, the Glass family or his experiences in WWII.
I’d better get to work on mine, then.
This time I hope her book reverses the myths created by the first one.
What would really be good is to help “progressives,” both in the south and the north, to have insight into their own raging bigotries.
That was the rumor because she never wrote another one.
She had other earlier works before GWTW.
She was also killed by a drunk driver, who only served 11 months in jail, in 1949 at age 48.
No, she wrote it. This, for some reason, came about during her note-taking for him on In Cold Blood.
She was a reporter and wrote one really short novella prior to that. Not unlike this situation - it was published after her death after being found stashed away somewhere.
My guess is that it is more a case of him helping her extensively than him writing it for her. She helped him on several books doing research, and he acknowledged such over the years. Knowing the literary world at the time they probably agreed to not acknowledge that he had a hand in it because then it wouldn't have been "To Kill A Mockingbird" By Harper Lee and editorial help by Truman Capote it would have been Truman Capote's new book written with Harper Lee
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