Eight Never-Before-Seen Short Stories by ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Author Harper Lee Will Be Published This Year
After Lee’s death in 2016, typescripts of her early fiction were discovered in her New York apartment. The previously unseen drafts offer new insights into her creative development
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/eli2.png)
Years before Harper Lee became a household name, literary journals and magazines rejected her attempts at fiction. After To Kill a Mockingbird launched the Alabama-born author to international fame, scholars assumed that those early stories were lost in slush piles or destroyed.
But Lee never let the stories disappear. Following her death in 2016, her executor discovered her earliest attempts at fiction stashed in her New York City apartment, according to the New York Times’ Alexandra Alter.
Now, for the first time ever, readers will finally have the chance to read eight of Lee’s early short stories, along with another eight nonfiction pieces previously published elsewhere, in the forthcoming collection The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories and Essays. According to a statement from Harper, an imprint of the publishing house HarperCollins, the collection will debut on October 21, 2025.
The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories and Essays
The Land of Sweet Forever combines Lee’s early short fiction and later nonfiction in a volume offering an unprecedented look at the development of her inimitable voice.
“As a member of Harper Lee’s surviving family, I know I speak for all of us in saying that we’re delighted that these essays, and especially the short stories, which we knew existed but were only recently discovered, have been found and are being published,” Edwin Conner, Lee’s nephew, says in the statement.
“She was not just our beloved aunt, but a great American writer, and we can never know too much about how she came to that pinnacle,” Conner adds.
Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, a setting that inspired much of her work. In the never-before-seen stories in The Land of Sweet Forever, Lee frequently draws on her childhood in the South and explores themes that would later show up in To Kill a Mockingbird, her bestselling novel published in 1960.
Consider, for instance, the development of Scout, also known as Jean Louise Finch, the young narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird. One story, “The Pinking Shears,” follows another young girl named Jean Louie. Another version of this character, Jean Louise, returns in the volume’s title story, “The Land of Sweet Forever,” according to the Times.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/9d/74/9d74dfa4-c892-4a55-97d2-cb77046655a8/photo_portrait_of_harper_lee_to_kill_a_mockingbird_dust_jacket_1960.jpg)
“It’s this wonderful little time capsule from her development as a writer,” Casey Cep, Lee’s authorized biographer and the author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, tells the Times.
The stories also show Lee venturing into “less familiar territory” and pulling from her life as a young writer in New York City, where she moved in 1949, as Ailah Ahmed, publishing director of Hutchinson Heinemann, which will publish the book in Britain, tells the Guardian’s Lucy Knight. Lee writes about visiting luncheonettes and theaters in Manhattan, while also expressing annoyance about traffic in the city.
In one of the collection’s nonfiction pieces, Lee offers a “delightful account” of Gregory Peck, who played Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, in the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, per the statement.
Lee published only two novels during her lifetime. The second, Go Set a Watchman, was written before To Kill a Mockingbird but released in 2015, a year before her death—a debut that sparked controversy about the author’s true intentions. Many scholars think it’s an early version of her magnum opus.
Why didn’t Lee publish more? Her friend Wayne Flynt, a former historian at Auburn University, gave NPR’s Lynn Neary and Colin Dwyer a straightforward explanation in 2016.
“I suppose what I would say is that there are some writers who have one great story to tell, and they tell that one great story,” Flynt said.
Perhaps The Land of Sweet Forever will show that Lee had more stories to tell, even though she kept them so close to her chest for so long.
“People are going to feel like they’re sitting at her desk with her,” Cep tells the Times. “It feels like the first piece of [a] much bigger puzzle of the life and work of Harper Lee.”
A Note to our Readers
Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission.
