For years before she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee wrote short stories with themes that she would later explore in that now-classic novel: small town gossip and politics, tender and tense relationships between fathers and daughters, race relations.
She tried and failed to get them published. Scholars and biographers have long thought the stories were lost or destroyed.
But Lee was a meticulous archivist. She stashed the typescripts of the stories, along with the rejection letters, in her New York City apartment, where her executor discovered them after her death in 2016.
This fall, those stories will be published for the first time in a collection titled “The Land of Sweet Forever.” The book, out on Oct. 21 from Harper, includes eight previously unreleased stories and eight pieces of nonfiction that Lee published in various outlets between 1961 and 2006, including a profile of her friend, the writer Truman Capote, a cornbread recipe and a letter to Oprah Winfrey.
Lee’s nephew, Edwin Conner, said that he and other members of her family were thrilled that the stories were preserved, and can now reach a wide audience. The estate decided to publish them in 2024, according to Harper.
“She was not just our beloved aunt, but a great American writer, and we can never know too much about how she came to that pinnacle,” Conner said in a statement released by Harper.
“The Land of Sweet Forever” adds a new layer to Lee’s complex legacy. After its release in 1960, “To Kill a Mockingbird” won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a classic film starring Gregory Peck. It went on to sell more than 46 million copies. Set in a small Alabama town modeled on Lee’s hometown, Monroeville, it tells the story of a young girl named Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, whose father Atticus tries to combat racial injustice.
For decades, “To Kill a Mockingbird” stood as Lee’s only published book, and many of her fans feared it would be her last. Then, in February 2015, Lee’s publisher announced that she would publish a second novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” a sequel of sorts that features a disillusioned, grown-up Jean Louise who questions her father, an aging Atticus, on his racist views. The novel’s release drew both praise and skepticism from some who questioned why Lee, then in her late 80s, would have sat on the manuscript for so many years, and whether she truly wanted to publish it.
Her short fiction shows Lee experimenting with characters and themes she later explored so memorably in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“It’s this wonderful little time capsule from her development as a writer,” Casey Cep, who will write an introduction to the collection, said in an interview. Cep is Lee’s authorized biographer and the author of “Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee,”
The stories draw on Lee’s childhood in Alabama and her life as a young writer in Manhattan, dining at luncheonettes and going to the movies. In one story, Lee writes about the frustrations of driving and parking in New York City.
Some of the stories set in the South reveal how Lee began developing Jean Louise Finch, the precocious and perceptive young narrator of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” A story titled “The Pinking Shears” features a girl named Jean Louie, who reappears as Jean Louise in a later story, “The Land of Sweet Forever.” The collection will also include some scans of the original typescripts with Lee’s notes.
“People are going to feel like they’re sitting at her desk with her,” said Cep, whose yet unscheduled Lee biography will be published by Harper. “It feels like the first piece of much bigger puzzle of the life and work of Harper Lee.”
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