To Kill a Mockingbird Sequel Published
July 14, 2015
Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman is officially released to the public today, making headlines as perhaps the most anticipated American novel of the millennium. The book is a sequel to Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the best-loved works in American literature.
Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, receiving the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. Until the appearance of the new book, To Kill a Mockingbird was the 89-year old Lee’s only published work of fiction.
Lee wrote To Set a Watchman in the mid 1950’s, yet a year ago, hardly anyone even knew it existed. After Lee had finished the manuscript, she expanded it into To Kill a Mockingbird on the advice of her editor. The original manuscript was then forgotten until Lee’s lawyer discovered it in 2014. The book is being published as originally written. The prospect of a new novel by Harper Lee immediately captured the public imagination. The novel had an initial print run of 2 million copies and became the most pre-ordered book in its publisher’s history.
To Kill a Mockingbird deals with bigotry and racism in the South during the 1930’s. The plot centers on Atticus Finch, a white, small-town lawyer in Alabama who defends a young black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. The story is narrated by the lawyer’s 6-year-old daughter, Jean Louise, nicknamed Scout. During the trial, Scout learns about the hypocrisy and prejudice of the adult world. The novel’s appeal lies in the author’s skill at weaving together the vivid eccentric characters of a small town, the observations of a sensitive child, and a plea for social justice.
Go Set a Watchman takes place in the socially turbulent 1950’s, 20 years after the events in To Kill a Mockingbird. It centers on Scout, now a 26-year old adult, as she returns to her Alabama childhood home to visit her father. Upon her return, Scout struggles with personal as well as political issues that involve her town’s past and its residents. She struggles to understand changes in the people and places she loved as a child, along with her changing relationship with her father and his beliefs.
The new novel has aroused fierce controversy over the strong suggestion that Atticus Finch was a racist rather than the image of decency and moderation he represents in To Kill a Mockingbird, an image reinforced by Gregory Peck’s Academy Award-winning performance in the 1962 film adaptation. In addition, some early reviewers of the book complained that Lee’s writing was uneven and that the book required further editing. Others praised vivid and lyrical passages they said equal her writing in her first novel. But any negative reactions seem unlikely to impede the book’s catapulting to the top of the bestseller lists.
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