NEW YORK — “To Kill a Mockingbird” will not be 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.
Reactions have ranged from a euphoric Oprah Winfrey, who issued a statement saying, “I couldn’t be happier if my name was Scout,” to skepticism that the new book will be of the same quality as “Mockingbird,” because Lee was a “beginning author” when she was writing “Watchman.”
“In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called ‘Go Set a Watchman,’ ” the 88-year-old Lee said in a statement issued by Harper. “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.”
