Harper Lee appears 'breezily self-assured' about book release; when was manuscript discovered?
Photo courtesy of HarperCollins.
Harper Lee was given a finished copy of her soon to be released novel, Go Set a Watchman, at a private lunch last week as her hometown prepared for a celebration to mark the occasion.
Lee appeared “breezily self-assured” about the book’s release, the New York Times reported, basing its conclusion on reports by people who attended.
Watchman, written before To Kill a Mockingbird, features Scout as an adult. Lee has said her editors liked the book’s flashbacks to Scout’s childhood and persuaded her to write a book from Scout’s point of view as a child. She did so, and To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960.
According to Lee Sentell, the director of the Alabama Tourism Department, Lee, 89, was asked at the lunch whether she ever expected the new book to be published. “Of course I did, don’t be silly,” Lee replied.
Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, will celebrate the release with a marathon reading of the new book in the courtroom where Mockingbird was filmed and with walking tours noting landmarks mentioned in the books.
The Times says there is an “evolving story” on how Watchman was discovered. Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter, has said she discovered the novel accidentally while reviewing a Mockingbird manuscript last summer. But a rare books expert who evaluated a Mockingbird manuscript in 2011 for insurance purposes noticed the characters were older and pointed it out to Carter and Lee’s then-agent, according to a source who spoke with the Times.
Carter says she left the bank vault where the manuscript was kept before the expert’s evaluation.
Meanwhile, Lee’s new agent, Andrew Nurnberg, said in a taped interview he had held a copy of Watchman in 2013, without realizing it, when Carter asked if he would like to see the original manuscript. He read a few pages, but didn’t see the Watchman manuscript in the large stack of pages. According to Nurnberg, Carter said there were differences and she suspected Lee had cut a lot from the original draft.
Neither realized it was an entirely different book, Nurnberg said.
