Publisher HarperCollins announced Tuesday that they will publish “Go Set a Watchman,” a novel by “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee.
In a press release issued by the publisher, Lee said, “In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called ‘Go Set a Watchman.’ It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel (what became ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’) from the point of view of the young Scout.”
This new novel will mark the first new work by Lee since “Mockingbird” was originally published in 1960. The original book, considered to be among the best novels of the twentieth century, follows a little girl named Scout as she tries to make sense of racial prejudice in her small Alabama hometown.
According to the publisher’s statement, in the new novel “Scout has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus. She 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.”
Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 for “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It was then adapted into an Academy Award winning film of the same name starring Gregory Peck.
“Go Set a Watchman” will hit shelves in July 14, 2015.