The new novel, called Go Set a Watchman takes place in the 1950s and features an adult Scout returning home to Maycomb from New York City to visit her father Atticus. In the official press release from Harper Collins Publishers, the author explains
In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called Go Set a Watchman. 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 from the point of view of the young Scout.
That novel, Lee’s debut, would of course be the beloved cultural touchstone To Kill a Mockingbird. We have multiple copies of the book and a DVD of the classic movie starring Gregory Peck.
Despite selling millions of copies, winning a Nobel Prize and becoming beloved by pretty much everyone everywhere, Lee has not published another novel or book of any kind since. Lee has an avowed aversion to attention, and although she has accepted awards (including the Presidential Medal of Freedom) she almost never even gives acceptance speeches.
If you’re curious about the writer who would turn away from fame and fortune, you may like to know that Lee was a very good friend of another literary big-shot, Truman Capote. They grew up together in Monroeville, Alabama. She assisted in researching his classic In Cold Blood. She appears in movies about Capote and the writing of that book, played by Sandra Bullock in Infamous and Catherine Keener in Capote.
If you like mysteries surrounding great American authors, you may also want to check out 2013’s Salinger, about the reclusive author of another beloved classic, The Catcher in the Rye.