Yes. That. Just what "jlfforalways" said:

"I dunno. Maybe if she publishes it now, it keeps her in the money until she dies."

We all seem to know that Miz Nelle Lee Harper was bamboozled out of the copyright of TKAM - which still sells over 1,000,000 copies annually. We all know that she never published another novel.…

i am worried too. apparently the draft was returned by her very tough editor who advised her to try again making scout a little girl. that second book was to kill a mockingbird. i heard somewhere else that this book is being edited lightly. one of her biographers reported that he'd suspected there was another novel…

But every time I read kafkas stories, I always think of brod fondly! I'm like, you're an asshole, brod, but thank god you didn't listen to that lunatic!

The publication may not matter to her in the end; but my fear is the lawyer's intentions. If she parades her on a press tour, if she tries to squeeze whatever commission/retainer (whatever) out of Lee, this puts her in the exact spot she didn't want to be in when she was of sound mind...

do you think that Kafka's writings should have been destroyed???

Great analogy with the Brod-Kafka reference!

I read Mockingbird on Kindle this year. Apparently, Harper Lee blocked that for years!

Oh good god, I hadn't even thought to be worried about that, my anxiety was profound but generalized. SO glad we have 5 more months to panic / speculate.

I'm friends with one of her great-nephews, Marshall Lee. When Marshall and I talked about the family connection (he was showing me the copy of TKM she had given him) years ago, he said her specific request had been for her second novel to only be published after she died. Her reasons were a) she never wanted to hear…

I'm actually of the opinion that once written or created, authors & artists no longer "own" their works or characters. Ie, what their wishes are regarding said works post-mortem, should never be followed. It would be the same as Van Gogh destroying one of his own paintings, or directing them to be destroyed.

This is kind of how I feel. You should wait until someone's dead to publish work they don't want published, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't once they're gone. We wouldn't have had the works of Emily Dickinson if not.

Here is one biography that mentions "Go Set a Watchman." It's clearly a first draft of TKAM, though.

According to two biographies, Lee had been writing short vignettes about life in Monroeville, AL when her buddy Capote introduced her to his literary contacts in NYC. On her own, she started weaving the stories together—with little satisfaction. Finally, she moved in with her compassionate editors, and under their…

The Kafka thing brings up a good point though: if this is published under shady circumstances but ends up being a great book, does it matter? Kafka wanted all of his unpublished stuff destroyed, which would have been a massive shame.

Yeah. This is probably it.

This has little to do with the situation at hand (of which I am admittedly wary for the same reasons), but I just need to say that I love the layers of literary references that are going on right now. It's comforting.

If she's as far gone as they say, on a philosophical level does it make much of a difference? I'm conflicted over it too.

Or something even more nefarious could be going on. What if someone is trying to pass off a manuscript as Lee's, when it is not?

This assumes there are archives. This might be what they've got.

Couldn't HarperCollins just wait until Lee dies and pull a Brod-on-Kafka maneuver and publish her entire back archives?