Skip the reviews and the hullabaloo and decide for yourself. Chronologically it’s the correct order and you will experience Lee’s exceptional writing as the world did with Mockingbird first. Scout is a child in Mockingbird and an adult in Watchman, a book which needs, demands, foreknowledge of setting, characters, and plot. You will laugh out loud at Scout’s voice and Maycomb. If you haven’t read Mockingbird since 8 th grade, read it again. Recommendations for the Reader (and for Book Club) Scout goes by her Christian name Jean Louise and things have changed. Scout is twenty years older and returns to Maycomb, Alabama, a fictional version of Lee’s hometown of Monroeville. Misleading? It’s the literary event of the century about the novel of the last century. The inside jacket flap of Go Set a Watchman has this inscription.įrom Harper Lee comes a landmark new novel set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee wrote it before she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird! So the manuscript is old, but the novel is new to readers.
However, since its discovery, the subsequent release was marketed as new. Published this year, 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman is not really new because Lee wrote it before To Kill A Mockingbird. Was Mockingbird a one hit wonder? The answer to that is yes, and no. So the world’s been waiting for Lee’s second novel for decades, almost given up on that possibility because of her reclusive nature. Readers believe in them, they seem three dimensional and they have to deal with some ugly stuff in the Deep South of the 1930s: a trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Who hasn’t heard of Boo Radley? Or Atticus Finch? Why? The humor, the characters, the plot, the theme, the first person narrative of Scout Finch, just one of literature’s memorable personalities from this novel. Yet To Kill a Mockingbird is often considered the best novel of the 20 th century. Since its publication in 1960, the book has been challenged by schools and parents and the NAACP, for profanity, sexual content, racial themes and epithets. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee is #4 on the Banned and Challenged Classics List ( see list) with the most recent objection in 2009 for language including racial slurs. The author’s ‘new’ novel was released this summer and stirred up a controversy, maybe because Harper Collins made historic sales of more than 1.1 million copies in the first week. It’s on 8 th grade reading lists around the country. What modern classic makes #4 on the banned book list?
Nelle Harper Lee at her parents’ home in Monroeville, Alabama in 1961
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