Eight previously unseen short stories by Harper Lee will be released Tuesday in a new collection titled “The Land of Sweet Forever.”
The collection marks the first major publication of the author’s work since “Go Set a Watchman” in 2015.
The stories, found in Lee’s New York apartment after her death in 2016, provide an early look at the development of the writer who would go on to create “To Kill a Mockingbird,” CNN reported.
The volume will include an introduction by Casey Cep, author of “Furious Hours” and Lee’s biographer, who described the pieces as a window into Lee’s “apprenticeship” as a storyteller.
Lee wrote the short stories shortly after leaving law school one semester shy of graduation and moving to New York City to pursue writing full time.
Some of the works contain early versions of themes and characters that later appeared in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” while others reflect her observations of city life, according to an article by Cep in The Guardian.
“Drafted in the decade before ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ after Lee had first moved to New York City in 1949, the stories feature some of the characters and settings she would soon make famous and reveal some of the contradictions and conflicts she would spend her life trying to resolve,” Cep wrote.
“I knew there were unpublished stories, I had no idea where the manuscripts of those stories were,” Lee’s nephew, Edwin Lee Conner, told the BBC.
Conner, who helped oversee the discovery of the materials, said the collection reveals the author’s formative creative process.
Conner and his cousin Molly Lee recalled their aunt as a gifted storyteller who often invented dramatic tales for them as children.
“The stories that she told me, she would make them up, but they all seemed to be based around, ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’… It seemed to me they were always on the moor, and she would just take me into the dark,” Molly Lee told the BBC.
Molly Lee said she is “very pleased” that the stories have been found.
“I think it’s interesting to see how her writing evolved and how she worked on her craft,” she said. “Even I can tell how she improved.”
Conner described the stories as “apprentice stories,” adding that they were not “the fullest expression of her genius — and yet there’s genius in them.”
“She was a brilliant writer in the making, and you see something of her brilliance in these stories,” he said.
In addition to the eight short stories, “The Land of Sweet Forever” will feature eight essays Harper Lee wrote following the publication of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
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