Harper Lee’s unpublished stories are not ‘thrilling’ – but offer insight into a literary legend

The Land of Sweet Forever consists of eight previously unpublished stories and another eight non-fiction pieces by American author Harper Lee, who died in 2016. The non-fiction essays first appeared in magazines such as McCall’s and Book of the Month Club Newsletter and they are all quite short.

Lee’s fame as a writer derives from her novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), which sold around 40 million copies and became one of the most widely taught books in United States classrooms during the second half of the 20th century. Its emollient representation of racial tensions in the Deep South chimed nicely with widespread anxieties among traditional white communities arising from civil rights movements of the 1960s.

An earlier draft of Mockingbird, entitled Go Set a Watchman, was published in 2015, shortly before Lee’s death. Again, it sold very well, shifting over a million copies in the US during the first week of publication, despite this first version being more ambivalent and less sentimental in tone about enduring racial hostilities.

The eight stories in this new volume, edited by Casey Cep – who is working on an “authorised biography” of Lee – date from the writer’s early years, before Mockingbird. They are set partly in her home town of Maycomb, Alabama, and partly in Manhattan, where...

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