Then Jean Louise finds a booklet on her father’s desk, The Black Plague, the cover of which shows a drawing of “an anthropophagous Negro.” Incensed, she rushes off to the courthouse where Atticus and Henry are taking part in a citizens’ council meeting. Hemingway had been dead nearly four decades when True at First Light appeared-Harper Lee is still alive in Monroeville, Alabama.Īccording to the meticulously researched biography by Charles Shields, in January of 1957 Lee went to see her agent, Maurice Crain, with “the first fifty pages of a novel, Go Set a Watchman.” Some Hemingway disciples were irked and hurt on behalf of the once heroic craftsman, but that irk and hurt seems somewhat mirthful when you compare it to what crowds of readers are feeling this week on behalf of Harper Lee. When Hemingway's unfinished novel True at First Light was published in 1999, we saw a brooding of editorials and essays about the ethics of publishing it, about what the author might think of the tarnishing caused by a lusterless draft he wouldn’t have let anyone glimpse. Here are the first and second installments. This piece is the third in a three-part series we’ll be publishing this week on Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lee’s new novel, Go Set a Watchman.
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