Harper Lee fans were flying high Feb. 3—on the wings of a mockingbird to be exact. Lee is best known for her Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, but do not call her a one-hit wonder. The 88-year-old American novelist has announced the publication of a second book, available July 14th, Go Set a Watchman.
Watchman gives readers the opportunity to make their way back to Maycomb for an overdue visit with now-adult Scout and Atticus Finch. The publisher, Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, says Scout is “forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.”
Although her second publication, Watchman was written in the 1950’s, before Mockingbird. Lee discarded the project after her editor, captivated by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, told her to write a new book from the child’s perspective.The original manuscript was believed to be lost, until discovered in fall of 2014.
The title, Go Set a Watchman, is derived from the King James Bible: "For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth" (Isaiah 21:6). Charles J. Shields, one of Lee’s biographers, says the title refers to the scene in To Kill A Mockingbird where Atticus is sitting outside the courthouse, defending Tom Robinson from vigilante justice. He is the watchman of Maycomb.
One day after it was announced, Go Set a Watchman was made available for pre-order on Amazon and is already #1 on the Amazon Bestsellers Rank.
In anticipation for her new novel, here are three rousing quotes from Lee’s classic original.
1. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
2. “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
3. “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”
