Second Harper Lee novel found

[lookin]

Go Set a Watchman will be published in July.

[TotallyOz]

I am thrilled beyond belief. I read this as a kid growing up in Alabama and never understood why no other books were written.

[MsGuy]

So do you think "Go Set a Watchman" will be as good as the one Truman Capote wrote?

[Guest callipygian]

So do you think "Go Set a Watchman" will be as good as the one Truman Capote wrote?

blasphemy! Pot Stirrer!

[AdamSmith]

Harper Lee book news leaves home town surprised, bemused and sceptical

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/06/harper-lee-home-town-monroeville-surprised-bemused-sceptical

[MsGuy]

To me, it's a red flag when someone begins restricting old friends from visiting an elderly person, especially when it appears that that individual has access to the elder's assets.

Not saying that's there's anything wrong, just that the situation warrants a look see by a responsible party.

[AdamSmith]

especially when it appears that that individual has access to the elder's assets.

And when that very individual is the one who just happens to "discover" the "lost" manuscript after all these years.

[lookin]

The story does sound a little too good to be true, doesn't it? I kind of wondered how she went from "No more to see, folks!" to "How nice! They found it!"

I'd guess the publisher would have someone who could figure out if it's hers or not, wouldn't they? So maybe she's been manipulated into releasing something she'd never have done willingly.

It would sure be nice if we had someone on the ground in Maycomb who could figure out what's really going on.

Someone with learnin' and book smarts natcherly, but also someone who knows the ways folks do in the South. Someone who doesn't miss a trick, but who blends in seamlessly.

Someone . . aw hell, do we have to git down an' beg?

[MsGuy]

Someone . . aw hell, do we have to git down an' beg?

Begging won't do the least bit of good.

Now if someone were to cough up a cash retainer the size of Mr. AdamSmith's hemorrhoids against a $250/hour fee, well then I might be persuaded to go nose around and find out what's what. Expenses extra.

[lookin]

Now if someone were to cough up a cash retainer the size of Mr. AdamSmith's hemorrhoids . . .

Thass a mighty big pile!

[MsGuy]

Thass a mighty big pile!

Now that's funny.

[AdamSmith]

Hmm.

Harper Lee Lawyer Offers More Details on Discovery of New Book

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/books/harper-lee-lawyer-offers-more-details-on-discovery-of-go-set-a-watchman.html

[AdamSmith]

Harper Lee tells inquisitive journalist to 'go away!'

To Kill a Mockingbird author sends written rebuff to reporter inquiring about forthcoming sequel Go Set a Watchman

The Guardian

An investigative reporter in Alabama has become the first journalist to receive a direct response from Harper Lee following her unexpected announcement that she would be releasing a sequel to her much-beloved, Pulitzer-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird this summer. Unfortunately for Al.com’s Connor Sheets, the reclusive author’s response to his heartfelt plea for comment turned out to be an unequivocal: “Go Away!”

After Lee said last month, via her lawyer Tonja Carter and agent Andrew Nurnberg, that she would be publishing her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, on 14 July, Sheets made what he described as “repeated attempts” to reach her. He visited the nursing home where the 88-year-old author currently resides, in Monroeville, Alabama, contacted her lawyer and her publisher, and interviewed residents of her hometown.

He then wrote her a two-page letter, which he posted to her last week, laying out how he had spoken with Lee’s acquaintances in Monroeville, how “most of them are concerned about you and what is happening with Go Set a Watchman and your legacy”, and how “many worry that maybe you are being exploited”.

“No one wants to believe these things, but all we have heard from you since the announcement that you would be releasing a second novel is statements through Carter and your publisher. The people who love your work would love to hear what you have to say in your own words, to hear it straight from you and not through the filter of an intermediary,” wrote Sheets.

“I realise you may never receive this letter, and that if you do you will likely crumple it up, throw it in the garbage, and never think of it again … I hope that you’ll respond, even if it’s just to say, ‘Heck no – go back to New York.’ And if not, I do wish you good luck. We are all looking forward to reading the second Harper Lee novel, but only if you really want us to.”

Yesterday, Sheets writes for Al.com, he received an envelope containing his letter, “wrinkled and refolded”, with the words “Go Away! Harper Lee” scrawled at the bottom.

Information about Go Set a Watchman has been tightly controlled since its existence was announced to the world, with Nurnberg insisting that interested foreign publishers travel to London read the manuscript in person in his office, according to the US trade paper Publishers Weekly. Lee has previously issued two statements about the novel, which was completed before To Kill a Mockingbird and features an adult Scout returning to her hometown Maycomb.

The first announcement, which came via her publisher’s press release, saw Lee say that she “hadn’t realised” the manuscript of Go Set a Watchman “had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it”.

Describing the novel as “a pretty decent effort”, Lee added that “after much thought and hesitation I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.”

The initial delight at the news from her millions of fans around the world was followed by concern that the situation indicated, as Lee’s biographer Charles Shields put it, “an elderly woman who’s getting poor advice”. A second statement was then issued via Lee’s lawyer Carter. “I’m alive and kicking and happy as hell with the reactions to Watchman,” Lee said.

Despite journalists from around the world flocking to Monroeville in an attempt to speak to Lee, or Carter, directly, Sheets is the first to land direct comment – albeit by post, and amounting to what he described as “four words and one punctuation mark scrawled in cursive Sharpie” – from the novelist.

“It appears that Nelle, as her friends call her, is very much with it, that she is still lucid and that her acerbic, press-averse side is fully intact,” he wrote for Al.com. “Not only does the handwriting have the same careless curlicues and vague vowels of verified Lee signatures I’ve seen in the past, but it also expresses a sentiment similar to those she has directed in the direction of poky journalists for several decades.”

Lee is said to handwrite her responses to interview requests, telling the New York Times in 2006 that her form response would be “hell, no”.

“She may have softened her language as she has advanced well into her golden years, but the thrust is the same: leave her alone,” wrote Sheets, adding that he would be buying a frame “for this snippet of derision from a true national treasure”.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/05/harper-lee-journalist-go-away-to-kill-a-mockingbird-sequel-go-set-a-watchman

[AdamSmith]

Harper Lee subject of elder abuse investigation in Alabama – report

Officials interviewed the 88-year-old author of To Kill a Mockingbird in February, the New York Times reports, following an unspecified complaint

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/12/harper-lee-elder-abuse-investigation-alabama-report

[RA1]

I am very sorry to hear such speculation of abuse. She (and others) deserve much better. When my mother was 88 (and probably yours also) no one had better try abusing them.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Things that make you go hmm...

Go Set a Watchman: mystery of Harper Lee manuscript discovery deepens

Lees lawyer claims she found the To Kill a Mockingbird prequel last August, but new report reveals a Sothebys books expert unearthed it three years ago

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/02/harper-lee-go-set-a-watchman-manuscript-discovery

[Guest liljohnny]

Someone seems to be trying hard to make some money :/

[AdamSmith]

Read the first chapter:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2015/jul/10/go-set-a-watchman-read-the-first-chapter

[MsGuy]

Read the first chapter:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2015/jul/10/go-set-a-watchman-read-the-first-chapter

Damn, you beat me to it. Again.

Well, what do you think, AS? As good as Capote or not?

[AdamSmith]

Well, what do you think, AS? As good as Capote or not?

Let me try:

We know Flannery O'Connor's deadly crack about To Kill a Mockingbird -- "It's interesting that all the people that are buying it don't know they are buying a children's book."

If this first chapter of Go Set a Watchman is representative of the rest, it might be that O'Connor simultaneously, rather miraculously, identified the thing that raises Mockingbird at least partway toward the plane of art.

Without reading all of the new (old) book obviously I can't form a fair judgment. But the writing in this excerpt is not so encouraging. I went back and looked at some of Mockingbird again and liked just the prose and voice a good bit more than in this sample from Watchman.

I will read the whole thing when it comes out.

[lookin]

Without reading all of the new (old) book obviously I can't form a fair judgment. But the writing in this excerpt is not so encouraging.

Not much of a literary critic here but join you in finding nothing in the snippet I read that pulls me in for more.

Now comes a review in The New York Times that suggests Atticus Finch was a racist in later life. And this has brought no less a critic than Al Sharpton to the fore.

Something tells me that the publisher who first read Go Set a Watchman all those years ago and suggested that Harper Lee go back and try again may have been onto something.

Atticus Finch is a racist in To Kill a Mockingbird’s sequel

[AdamSmith]

Just as a parlor trick, here is the opening of Go Set a Watchman:

Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical. Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed tires. She grinned when she saw her first TV antenna atop an unpainted Negro house; as they multiplied, her joy rose.

Jean Louise Finch always made this journey by air, but she decided to go by train from New York to Maycomb Junction on her fifth annual trip home. For one thing, she had the life scared out of her the last time she was on a plane: the pilot elected to fly through a tornado. For another thing, flying home meant her father rising at three in the morning, driving a hundred miles to meet her in Mobile, and doing a full day’s work afterwards: he was seventy-two now and this was no longer fair.

And then here, coincidentally likewise set on a train, is the opening of Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's first novel:

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the farthest edge of the woods. Nearer, the plowed fields curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones. Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock, who was facing Motes in the section, said that she thought the early evening like this was the prettiest time of day and she asked him if he didn't think so too. She was a fat woman with pink collars and cuffs and pear-shaped legs that slanted off the train seat and didn't reach the floor.

Elsewhere in the same book O'Connor writes:

Two doors flew open and he found himself moving down a long red foyer and then up a darker tunnel and then up a higher, still darker tunnel. In a few minutes he was up in a high part of the maw, feeling around, like Jonah, for a seat.

And that's just someone entering a movie theater.

There are writers, and then there are writers.

[AdamSmith]

And the opening of O'Connor's other novel, The Violent Bear It Away:

Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Savior at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.

(The jug, we shortly learn, is because the late uncle had been a moonshiner.)

[MsGuy]

I seem to recall (way back when) feeling like seeing Atticus as anything other than a racist was an almost wilful misreading of the novel. The movie version has always made me extremely uncomfortable in its ambiguity on this point. See the nice white man stand up and defend the poor colored boy from those nasty peckerwoods.

To me, Atticus was a kindly inclined man with strong ideas of fairness & of his responsibility as a lawyer to defend his client, negro or no. Throw in a little noblesse oblige toward lesser, dependant folks and there you have Lawyer Finch in a nutshell.

I grew up around any number of White Southerners pretty much like that. A lack of animus toward black people as individuals was not the same thing as having any sense of urgentcy to see the caste system of the South shattered, not by a long shot.

There is a documentary on Ms. Lee currently running on PBS that quotes her as being quite hostile to Freedom Riders forcing the issue of segregation in public accommodations. (In fairness to her, she found the early MLK program of peaceful petitioning for redress of grievances much more palatable.)

Again, not unlike a lot of the folks I grew up with.

[RA1]

As I grew up, I was shocked to notice that not every white person was as you described.

Best regards,

RA1