In this Aug. 20, 2007, file photo, author Harper Lee smiles during a ceremony honoring the four new members of the Alabama Academy of Honor at the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. Lee’s attorney has provided her fullest accounting yet of how she came upon the manuscript for “Go Set a Watchman.”Rob Carr/The Associated Press
Less than 10 hours before the release of the most anticipated book in years, Jonathan Burnham, the publisher of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, was stuck in "a routine finance meeting" that ran late. It was in these types of meetings, he explained a few minutes after extracting himself to call a reporter, that a joke was born.
"There was always a joke, when we were making budgets, that maybe Harper Lee would deliver another novel," Mr. Burnham said on the phone from New York. "But nobody ever believed it. So, when the day came along, it was dumbfounding."
On Tuesday, after months of speculation and 55 years after the classic To Kill A Mockingbird was published, Go Set A Watchman, Harper Lee's second novel – or first, depending on how you look at it – will arrive in bookstores.
Although greatly anticipated, it's a day readers of To Kill A Mockingbird, one of the most celebrated novels – American or otherwise – of the 20th century, probably never anticipated themselves; for decades it seemed as if the publicity-shy Ms. Lee would write but a single novel, albeit one that won the Pulitzer Prize, has sold tens of millions of copies around the world, and is a mainstay of school curriculums across North America.
"In my time here, there's been nothing as big as this," Leo MacDonald, senior vice president of sales and marketing at HarperCollins Canada, which will distribute 200,000 in Canada, said. "It's a publishing event."
Excitement was ramping up at bookstores and libraries across the country, too. The Halifax Public Library had ordered more than 75 copies across all formats, with almost 400 holds as of Monday, while the Toronto Public Library had ordered nearly 650 copies with almost 2,000 holds. ("The holds are going up as we speak," said Susan Caron, the TPL's head of collections management.) Indigo Books and Music was partnering with Cineplex to screen the 1962 film adapation on Monday evening in several theatres across Canada. Jim Sherman, owner of Perfect Books in Ottawa, said most of the copies he'd ordered for his store had been presold. (A former high school teacher who taught To Kill A Mockingbird for decades, he called the new novel "powerful" and "provacative.") Ian Elliot, owner of A Different Drummer in Burlington, Ont., said "in the last six weeks or so it's been very much the most-talked about title." Shelley Macbeth, owner of Blue Heron Books in Uxbridge, Ont., who'd scheduled actor Kenneth Welsh to drop by the bookstore on Tuesday to read from To Kill A Mockingbird, said she never thought she'd sell a new novel by Ms. Lee.
Interest in the book lies not only in the continued love of Mockingbird, but the circumstances surrounding its rediscovery and publication, reportedly found in a safe deposit box last August by her long-time attorney Tonja Carter. (In an op-ed published Sunday on The Wall Street Journal's website, Ms. Carter wrote: "the manuscript for Watchman was underneath a stack of a significant number of pages of another typed text," already leading to speculation about a third novel.) Alabama officials went so far as to launch an investigation as to whether the 89-year-old Ms. Lee, who resides in an assisted-living facility in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., was aware or consented to the novel's publication – they concluded she was.
"Once it's released into the world, I feel that [the novel] will speak for itself, finally," Mr. Burnham said.
But is it any good?
Although written several years before Mockingbird, Go Set A Watchman is set 20 years after the events of that novel. In the opening chapter, the now-26-year-old Jean Louise Finch, better known as Scout, returns to her childhood home of Maycomb, Ala., from New York, where she's lived for several years. She discovers her feelings toward the town have changed.
Whereas Mockingbird hinged on the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man defended by Scout's father, Atticus Finch, after being (falsely) accused of raping a white woman – an event alluded to in the new book, with a notable twist – the thrust of Watchman concerns Scout's discovery that her father, the moral compass of Mockingbird and one of literature's enduring heroes, is not the man she thought he was. He sits on the board of directors of the Maycomb County Citizens' Council, an odious organization convened in the wake of the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to end school segregation, and it's even revealed he once attended a KKK meeting. ("The one human being [Scout] had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her," Ms. Lee writes.) Indeed, the Atticus of Go Set A Watchman is a far cry from the character portrayed by Gregory Peck in the film, a beacon of tolerance and understanding. It is, frankly, shocking to read Atticus say things like "You realize that our Negro population is backward, don't you?" and "Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people."
The revelations have prompted some dismay among readers on social media, with some going so far to claim they won't read the novel.
"I do feel that much of the … discussion has taken place between people who quite reasonably haven't yet read the book," Mr. Burnham said. "I feel once they read the book and see the portrayal of Atticus's character in the context, and come to a closer understanding of what Harper Lee was trying to achieve with this novel, they will maybe look at it in a different light, and find a very powerful, very compelling, very brave portrait of a particular society in a particular time in history."
Ms. Lee completed the novel in 1957, while, like Scout, she was living in New York. "I thought it a pretty decent effort," said Ms. Lee in a statement released when the novel was announced in February. "My editor, who 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." (Her editor Tay Hohoff's suggestion was a wise one; the flashbacks are the most delightful parts of the novel.)
Charles Shields, author of the 2006 biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, thinks concerned readers "should embrace Go Set A Watchman for what it is, which is a book about a man with prejudices, a man who is fairly typical of many intelligent Americans at that time."
In any case, "nothing will ever change the greatness of To Kill A Mockingbird; it's the Huck Finn of the 20th century," he added. "I think, if anything, this will just deepen her legacy."