Harper Lee’s writing career was brief, but her single novel became one of the most famous in American history. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) won the Pulitzer Prize, sold tens of millions of copies and remains a fixture of classrooms and popular memory. She published almost nothing else until Go Set a Watchman – an earlier draft of Mockingbird – appeared in 2015, just before her death and perhaps without her meaningful consent.

The Land of Sweet Forever gathers apprentice stories written before Mockingbird, along with a few later magazine pieces. Most are slight and the volume is more commercial than literary. Yet the early stories show Lee testing the voice and tensions that would define her later work: an insider’s affection for the South strained by growing awareness of its injustices.

Harper Lee knew the world she came from, and she knew whatit cost to write about it honestly

Watchman was controversial because it revealed what Mockingbird had worked so hard to conceal: its Atticus Finch is an avowed segregationist and his adult daughter, Jean Louise, though calling herself ‘colour blind’, recoils at the idea of inter-racial marriage. The shock many readers felt in 2015 was like discovering an early draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four in which Orwell shrugs off mass........

© The Spectator