There Might be a Third Harper Lee Novel

By: Feb. 07, 2015
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In 1974, Alice Lee gave an interview to the BBC. Alice Lee, the lawyer and big sister of Nelle Harper, who would later become the guardian of the writer's privacy, gave an interview in 1974 in which she claimed that a second, almost completed novel had been stolen from Harper's New York apartment.

41 years later, it was announced that a second Harper Lee novel will be published this July. The official statement from HarperCollins, Lee's publisher, says that "the original manuscript of the novel was considered to have been lost until fall 2014, when [Lee's Lawyer] Tonja Carter discovered it in a secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird."

That "secure location" was Alice's safety deposit box, Mockingbird documentary-maker Mary Murphy believes. Alice died in November. When Murphy interviewed her before her 2010 film, Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird, Alice told her that "she had the original [To Kill a Mockingbird] manuscript in a safety deposit box in a vault in the bank in Monroeville". Murphy told the Associated Press: "I believe that after Miss Alice died ... Tonja Carter, who worked in the firm that Alice and Nelle's father started, went to the safety deposit box and there, affixed to the original manuscript, was this other manuscript. I can't confirm that, but that's how I think it happened."

Lee's editor at HarperCollins, Hugh Van Dusen, corroborates. "The version I was told was that the book was in either a safe deposit box or a bank vault, and it was wrapped in a manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird and nobody noticed it for all these years", he told New York Magazine.

As is now known, Go Set a Watchman was a separate draft Lee, as a debut writer, presented to her editor Tay Hohoff in the mid-Fifties. Hohoff, according to Lee's official statement earlier this week, "was taken by the flashbacks to Scout's childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout. I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told". But Lee had written another draft around the same time: Atticus. While the details surrounding it vary, it also dealt with the character based on Lee's father, a lawyer working in Alabama in the Thirties. Could this too emerge in the future and be reprinted, unedited, as a third novel - just as To Set a Watchman will this summer?

There are many mentions of the draft Atticus. New York Magazine claimed that Lee had a "draft of Atticus out on submission" within five months of giving up her day job to write, "and was already part way into a second novel when a Lippincott editor took it on" suggesting that Atticus became her first published novel. In the Smithsonian in 2010, Charles Leerhsen writes of a "hodgepodge of anecdotes about small-town Southern life, first called Go Set a Watchman and then Atticus." Four years before that, The Canberra Times reported that the manuscript which Hohoff developed into To Kill A Mockingbird was "entitled Atticus on first submission". Also in 2006, The New York Times documents a name change: "the beginnings of a novel, Go Set a Watchman, which becomes Atticus, which ... [Lee] finishes in the summer of 1959." In his 2008 book, I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee, Charles J Shields notes a name change between a draft called Atticus and a novel called To Kill a Mockingbird three times. Just as Hohoff agreed with the author that she become Harper Lee on the eve of publication, Atticus became To Kill A Mockingbird.

Sarah Churchwell, Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities University of East Anglia, says that the different titles "don't necessarily indicate distinct versions." Churchwell says the announcement of Go Set A Watchman doesn't mean that Hohoff and Lee weren't just trying out a different title with Atticus - "or it might be a different draft. We simply don't know." She adds: "It seems there is more information about later character and story development in an earlier version that is now being published, and it may be more different from the final Mockingbird than scholars had previously inferred. That's what this really amounts to."

But nobody knows where these earlier drafts -reside. Maybe Go Set a Watchman isn't the second novel which Alice mentioned in the Seventies, and which Lee was reportedly working on when Hohoff read Atticus. Or maybe, it's resting in a bank vault too, and in another 41 years, another Lee novel could appear.

Read the original story here.



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