Much of Watchman centers on these confrontations.īecause Lee lacked literary confidence in her writing in 1957 and because her rewrite of Watchman into Mockingbird was so spectacularly successful, she never returned to her unfinished manuscript. Jean Louise is appalled and confronts her boyfriend, father, uncle, aunt, and childhood acquaintances about their racism. Henry Clinton, her unofficial fiancée and her father’s law partner, and Atticus Finch are trying to wrest control of the fledgling racist organization from its more violent spokesmen. What she overhears stuns and enrages her. In a pivotal scene, Jean Louise accidentally wanders upon a White Citizens Council meeting in the town’s historic courthouse and secretly listens from her location in the segregated balcony. In Watchman, Atticus Finch is aging and infirm Jim is dead Dill lives in Europe Calpurnia is alienated from the Finch family and most of Maycomb’s white population and Jean Louise’s relationship with her relatives has collapsed into acrimony, alienation, and confrontation.

In fact, the novels are substantially different.Īlthough Watchman contains familiar names from Mockingbird and has flashbacks to the protagonist’s childhood, the story revolves around a 26-year-old Jean Louise visiting Maycomb near the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. This hypothesis was disproved when Watchman was published.

In subsequent years, Lee’s biographers would suggest that she absorbed most of the Watchman manuscript into what became internationally acclaimed novel To Kill A Mockingbird. Lee responded by writing a story about Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, a young girl in a small southern town who learns to see the racism that pervades her society and how it affects the people around her. Neither her agent at the time, Maurice Crain, nor her editor, Tay Hohoff, much liked it and urged her to adapt the brilliant characterizations of a small-town southern childhood to a different setting and plot. Lee originally delivered the manuscript to her editor at Lippincott’s early in 1957. Both the announcement and the new book itself launched an international media and cultural firestorm that continued for many months. Watchman was released on July 14, 2015, and its first day sales amounted to more than 700,000 copies, making it the most successful adult novel ever published in America. Until the publication of Go Set A Watchman, Mockingbird would be her only published novel. The book is the unedited version of Lee’s rejected original submission of To Kill A Mockingbird, her 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. On February 3, 2015, the literary world was stunned by an announcement from HarperCollins Publishers about the discovery and pending publication of the work.

The book Go Set A Watchman is the second published novel by renowned Alabama author Nelle Harper Lee.

Harper lee books go set a watchman