Famously reclusive author Harper Lee has announced a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, more than fifty years after the latter’s publication. The new book, titled Go Set a Watchman will be published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, on July 14, 2015.
Go Set a Watchman was originally written before Mockingbird, and features the bestseller’s protagonist, Scout, as an adult. Set during the mid-1950s, it features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years later. Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus. 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 uproar around the impending publication of “Watchman,” which erupted in the literary universe since the novel was announced early this month, stems from the fact that Lee had long vowed she would never publish again. Lee is one of the most famously private authors in modern publishing history, up there with J.D. Salinger, who also wrote one iconic work and then hid behind a veil of privacy. The announcement that Harper Lee is to revisit the characters of To Kill a Mockingbird has been greeted with both delight and suspicion. The press release from HarperCollins announcing the imminent publication of Go Set a Watchman featured a quote from Lee in which she declared herself “humbled and amazed” that the book would see the light of day, 55 years after her last novel.
A series of strokes in the past decade has left Lee partially deaf and blind, and living in a nursing home in Monroeville, Alabama. According to publisher, they came upon the manuscript at a “secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird”.