Go Set a Watchman

by Harper Lee

Overview

#1 New York Times Bestseller

“Go Set a Watchman is such an important book, perhaps the most important novel on race to come out of the white South in decades."  — New York Times

A landmark novel by Harper Lee, set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch—“Scout”—returns home to Maycomb, Alabama from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise’s homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town, and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past—a journey that can only be guided by one’s own conscience.

Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of the late Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor, and effortless precision—a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context, and new meaning to an American classic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062409874
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/14/2015
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Lexile:	870L (what's this?)
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. One of America’s most celebrated and influential writers, she is the author of the acclaimed novels To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman as well as the story and essay collection, The Land of Sweet Forever, published posthumously in 2025. Lee was awarded numerous literary awards and honors including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died in 2016 at the age of eight-nine.

Hometown:

Monroeville, Alabama

Date of Birth:

April 28, 1926

Date of Death:

February 19, 2016

Place of Birth:

Monroeville, Alabama

Place of Death:

Monroeville, Alabama

Editorial Reviews

To Kill a Mockingbird was first published on July 11th, 1960. Now fifty-five years later, this forty-million copy seller, Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller finally has a sequel. Go Set a Watchman features many of the characters that helped its predecessor win honors as "The Best Novel of the 20th Century." Set twenty years after the events of To Kill a Mockingbird, it focuses on a visit that Jean Louise Finch (a.k.a. "Scout") pays to the Maycomb home of her lawyer father Atticus. Composed before the novel that made her famous, this eagerly anticipated fiction promises to give readers a deeper sense of the Finch family and the Alabama town that shaped them.

8/28/2015
The publication of Go Set a Watchman was one of the most exciting and unexpected literary events in recent memory. Now that we’ve all had a chance to digest a novel we never thought we’d get to read, we’re ruminating on a few of its most powerful and memorable moments. Warning: spoilers throughout. Read More

B&N Reads

Now that the brouhaha from the publication of Go Set a Watchman has quieted, we are left, like Maycomb's citizens, to examine society's rough judgment. In no particular order, we've heard the following: that the book is a rough first draft of Mockingbird. That it's our first taste of an adult Scout or a shockingly racist Atticus. That it's an odious money-grab on the part of its publishers, since Lee herself vowed to never write another book — and, now deaf and nearly blind in a nursing home, Lee hasn't sanctioned its publication. That the discussion of race lacks the subtlety and strength of the original, and, most important, parents who've named their children after Atticus have to rethink the whole thing.

Some of these are opinions, and some are mistaken. (Search "the Jane Austen of southern Alabama" for Harper's subsequent writing efforts — and read Mockingbird itself to see that it is entirely from the point of view of the adult Scout, looking back.) They show we have not paid a great deal of attention to Mockingbird — or to Watchman, either. Because Watchman is not a failed race novel or a rough draft of Mockingbird. It's a novel about Jean Louise becoming a woman and a sexual being.

In the novel's most vivid and brilliant chapters, the childhood Jean Louise gets her period, a teen Jean Louise unsuccessfully stuffs her (nonexistent) bra, and her adult self fumbles with the idea of marrying childhood beau Henry Clinton. That Jean Louise, just off the train and being driven home by Henry, coldly rejects his proposal at the prospect of "another shabby little affair ... la the Birmingham country club set" amid the "latest Westinghouse appliances."

Jean Louise's adult self is as cosmopolitan as her childhood self is ignorant. In this book, the dramatic crisis comes when Jean Louise's falsies wind up on a billboard honoring WWII veterans from the high school. (By way of boyfriend Henry Clinton, Atticus saves her from conviction.) In a more disturbing section, when a sixth-grade classmate gets pregnant by her father, Jean Louise, who has recently begun to menstruate, thinks she can become pregnant by a classmate who's forced a kiss on her. A brutal year passes, at the close of which she attempts suicide. She is only narrowly saved by Henry.

Slowly and deliberately Calpurnia told her the simple story. As Jean Louise listened, her year's recollection of revolting information fell into a fresh crystal design; as Calpurnia's husky voice drove out her year's accumulation of terror, Jean Louise felt life return. She breathed deeply and felt cool autumn in her throat. She heard sausages hissing in the kitchen, saw her brother's collection of sports magazines on the living room table, smelled the bittersweet odor of Calpurnia's hairdressing.

When Aunt Alexandra — whose milk glass collection, Jean Louise tells us, is a signifier of a woman who "despises men and thrives out of their presence" — throws Jean Louise a much-feared Coffee, her social gathering of the town's women, we are treated to a stunning chapter worthy of The Group (with notes of Peyton Place). Like an anthropologist, Jean Louise is the silent recipient of the idle chatter that codifies the world of Maycomb's women: "When Jerry was two months old he looked up at me and said . . . toilet training should really begin with . . . he was christened he grabbed Mr. Stone by the hair and Mr. Stone . . . wets the bed now."

Jean Louise's breasts come up again — literally — when she scandalizes the town by swimming fully clothed with Henry in the river. The gossip has Henry and Jean Louise skinny-dipping. This, like her childhood scrapes, Aunt Alexandra finds horrifying, Atticus amusing. "I hope you weren't doing the backstroke," Atticus notes wryly.

Atticus's sense of humor in that moment is much closer to the one we find in Mockingbird, but much of the hoopla over Atticus's racism may have stemmed from a misunderstanding of Mockingbird's take on race in the first place. I'm far from the first to make this observation, but for a novel that purports to be about racial tensions, most of the action in Mockingbird happens between white people. Mockingbird takes place during the boom of historically black colleges and Negro secondary schools, one in which black educators and intellectuals fanned out across the South to create an educated middle class in the midst of segregation and unchecked violence. But Calpurnia's "white" voice, it seems, is mostly learned from her proximity to white people, and her humanity is shown through her love of Scout and Jem.

The same is true of Maycomb's black community, whose humanity is evidenced mostly through their deference to white people. (Readers may note the irony in the fact that, in a book published in 1960, Maycomb's black citizens seem always to be getting up and giving the Finch children seats.) We never know how Tom feels about being stuck in a jail with only a child and lawyer between him and a lynch mob — I can't imagine heading securely off to sleep at Atticus's assurance, myself — and we'll never know how Dolphus Raymond's partner feels about the fact that he must pretend he's drunk in public to be with her. Add Lee writing about Scout breathing in "the warm bittersweet smell of clean Negro," or admiring Tom as a "black-velvet Negro, not shiny, but soft black velvet," you see that while Go Set a Watchman is controversial for some, Mockingbird was always pretty controversial for others. (I'm still waiting for the book in which a white character is introduced by his or her color and smell.)

Despite the official story, it's unlikely that Watchman is a first draft of Mockingbird. It's an entirely different book, in time period, point-of-view, and plot. (Save a few should-be- stricken scenes dropped in whole cloth from the classic.) Many reviewers have noted the oddity of Watchman's assuming readers will have such familiarity with a cast of characters we've never met before, or that Mockingbird was born of a scant two paragraphs mentioning Atticus's famous case.

Instead, Go Set a Watchman reads more like a companion book, even simultaneous draft, one in which Lee shows she's aware of a black community that attends Tuskegee and, in Uncle Jack's speeches, finds an ugly, quasi-intellectual racism closer to home. As a character, Henry Clinton gives voice to the "trash" cursorily dismissed by Atticus in Mockingbird — but as a love interest, Reader: thank God she doesn't marry him. If it's true that editor Alice Tayoff gently steered Lee into Mockingbird, I think Lee could have produced something as vibrant and interesting here, but these sections as they exist are clumsy and underworked — probably of more use to scholars and interested parties than to the devoted Lee fan.

That is not true, however, of the nearly half of the book that comprises Jean Louise's growth from Scout to a woman. Among Coffees, falsies, and the codes of southern womanhood, this book finds its truest thread. I want to see more of the post-WWII social stratum of families with their Mixmasters and matchbox houses, more of Jean Louise's life in New York, where she does not date but goes to the Artist's League to paint at night. In Aunt Alexandra's Coffee, we find an antihero that unseats Atticus. There's another novel in the ruination Jean Louise visits upon southern femininity, in what happens when she descends from the balcony below which Atticus and the townsmen talk. Mockingbird took us into the world through the eyes of a child, but Lee might have had it in her to write a classic about the education of a woman.

Lizzie Skurnick is the author of Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. She lives in Jersey City.

Reviewer: Lizzie Skurnick

The Barnes & Noble Review

2015-07-15
The long-awaited, much-discussed sequel that might have been a prequel—and that makes tolerably good company for its classic predecessor. It's not To Kill a Mockingbird, and it too often reads like a first draft, but Lee's story nonetheless has weight and gravity. Scout—that is, Miss Jean Louise Finch—has been living in New York for years. As the story opens, she's on the way back to Maycomb, Alabama, wearing "gray slacks, a black sleeveless blouse, white socks, and loafers," an outfit calculated to offend her prim and proper aunt. The time is pre-Kennedy; in an early sighting, Atticus Finch, square-jawed crusader for justice, is glaring at a book about Alger Hiss. But is Atticus really on the side of justice? As Scout wanders from porch to porch and parlor to parlor on both the black and white sides of the tracks, she hears stories that complicate her—and our—understanding of her father. To modern eyes, Atticus harbors racist sentiments: "Jean Louise," he says in one exchange, "Have you ever considered that you can't have a set of backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization and have a social Arcadia?" Though Scout is shocked by Atticus' pronouncements that African-Americans are not yet prepared to enjoy full civil rights, her father is far less a Strom Thurmond-school segregationist than an old-school conservative of evolving views, "a healthy old man with a constitutional mistrust of paternalism and government in large doses," as her uncle puts it. Perhaps the real revelation is that Scout is sometimes unpleasant and often unpleasantly confrontational, as a young person among oldsters can be. Lee, who is plainly on the side of equality, writes of class, religion, and race, but most affectingly of the clash of generations and traditions, with an Atticus tolerant and approving of Scout's reformist ways: "I certainly hoped a daughter of mine'd hold her ground for what she thinks is right—stand up to me first of all." It's not To Kill a Mockingbird, yes, but it's very much worth reading.

Kirkus Reviews