(CNN) — Two startling revelations about long-hidden work by “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee have stunned readers awaiting Tuesday’s release of her new book, “Go Set a Watchman.”
Lee’s attorney, Tonja Carter, hinted Monday in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that the reclusive author may have written a third novel.
Carter wrote that she recently examined the contents of a safe-deposit box in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, and saw the manuscript for “Watchman” lying “underneath a stack of a significant number of pages of another typed text.”
“Was it an earlier draft of ‘Watchman,’ or of ‘Mockingbird,’ or even, as early correspondence indicates it might be, a third book bridging the two? I don’t know,” Carter said. Experts, under direction from Lee, will be asked in the coming months to authenticate the pages, she said.
This disclosure comes on the heels of early reviews of “Watchman,” published over the weekend, indicating that “Mockingbird’s” principled lawyer Atticus Finch, who in that book defended a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, has developed racist views.
Set 20 years after “Mockingbird,” “Watchman” finds Scout Finch returning to her fictional Maycomb, Alabama, hometown in the 1950s from New York to find with dismay that her father has attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting and rails against desegregation.
The revised portrait of Atticus has horrified many fans of “Mockingbird,” as it had been left to their imaginations to continue the story.
In the 55 years since its release, the novel has become a staple of high-school reading lists and one of the most beloved books in American literature. The Academy Award-winning 1962 film, with Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, only added to its legacy.
Until this week, “Mockingbird” remained Lee’s only published novel.
“Go Set a Watchman” was actually written years before “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Lee finished “Watchman” in 1957, but her editor suggested revising it several times until Lee used Scout Finch to tell the story from a child’s perspective.
Now, 89, Lee resides in an assisted-living community in Alabama and is reported to be hard of hearing and nearly blind after a stroke in 2007.
All this news can only boost anticipation for the new book’s official release. “Go Set a Watchman” is the top-selling book on Amazon, with “Mockingbird” at No. 2.