Free Republic

The controversy over Harper Lee's new "old" novel, "Go Set a Watchman," might be the most bizarre controversy yet in a summer of bizarre and unlikely explosions of national piety. Atticus Finch, the patriarchal figure of "To Kill a Mockingbird," has been regarded as an unexpected hero in a region that many readers thought was unworthy of heroes -- mothers named their children after him -- and now many feel betrayed because he emerges in the new novel as a man with unexpected blemishes, an authentic representative of his time (the 1950s) and place (a small town in the South)....

The first problem in assessing Harper Lee’s first published novel in the five and a half decades since To Kill a Mockingbird is whether to describe it as her first or second book. This apparently simple question has been contested in the months before Tuesday’s much publicised and heavily embargoed release of a manuscript that reportedly came to light only recently. Chronologically, Go Set a Watchman is, in Hollywood arithmetic, a sort of Mockingbird 2, depicting the later lives of the Finch family – lawyer Atticus, his daughter, Scout, his son, Jem and their maid, Calpurnia – who appeared in...

Two startling revelations about long-hidden work by "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee have stunned readers awaiting Tuesday's release of her new book, "Go Set a Watchman." Lee's attorney, Tonja Carter, hinted Monday in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that the reclusive author may have written a third novel. Carter wrote that she recently examined the contents of a safe-deposit box in Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, and saw the manuscript for "Watchman" lying "underneath a stack of a significant number of pages of another typed text." "Was it an earlier draft of 'Watchman,' or of 'Mockingbird,'...

The New York Times has its review up of Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman,” the sequel to the iconic masterpiece “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but there’s just one problem. It turns out that Atticus Finch is not the anti-racism crusader we all believed him to be. In fact, he’s “a racist who once attended a Klan meeting.”

Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical. Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed tires. She grinned when she saw her first TV antenna atop an unpainted Negro house; as they multiplied, her joy rose. Jean Louise Finch always made this journey by air, but she decided to go by train from New York to Maycomb Junction on her fifth...

Nearly 60 years after Harper Lee wrote “Go Set a Watchman,” the novel she hoped would be her literary debut, the 89-year-old author was handed a finished copy of the book at a private lunch in Monroeville, Ala., last week. Despite the manuscript’s long and uncertain journey to publication, Ms. Lee seemed breezily self-assured about the book’s highly anticipated release next week, people who attended said. After her publishers gave her the first copies off the presses of the American and British versions of “Watchman,” Ms. Lee was asked if she ever expected the novel to be published. “Of course...

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...

To Kill a Mockingbird' will not be the reclusive author Harper Lee's only published book after all. Publisher Harper announced Tuesday that 'Go Set a Watchman,' a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed in the 1950s and put aside, will be released July 14. Rediscovered last fall, 'Go Set a Watchman' is essentially a sequel to 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' although it was finished earlier. The 304-page book will be Lee's second, and the first new work in more than 50 years. The publisher plans a first printing of 2 million copies. 'In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called...