Go Set a Watchman

Harper Lee's first book since To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, Go Set a Watchman was marketed as a sequel to the classic novel. Set in the 1950s, it is about Scout -- Jean Louise Finch -- returning to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama to see her father, the upright lawyer Atticus Finch. While there, 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. It is being described as a compelling and ultimately moving narrative about a father and a daughter's relationship, and the life of a small Alabama town living through the racial tensions of the 1950s.

Go Set a Watchman was actually written in the mid-1950s, before To Kill a Mockingbird, and is in fact responsible for the existence of that book. According to Lee, "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. I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told." In the process the manuscript of Watchman was thought lost, but a friend of Lee's discovered a surviving copy.

After its 2015 publication, it was revealed that Go Set a Watchman was actually Lee's first attempt to tell the story that became To Kill a Mockingbird. The claims that it was a sequel was merely marketing by HarperCollins, the publisher.

Pretty obviously not to be confused with Watchmen.


 * Deep South: Maycomb, Alabama.
 * The Fifties
 * Flash Back: The narrative is punctuated with the adult Scout's flashbacks to her childhood.
 * Sequel Gap: Some 65 years separated To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman.