A new collection of Harper Lee’s early short stories show “a brilliant writer in the making”, her family have said.
Pulitzer Prize winner Lee, who died in 2016 at the age of 89, is best known as the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, a tale of race relations and legal injustice in 1930s Alabama.
The novel, released in 1960, is thought to have sold more than 40 million copies since its publication and is widely considered a classic of 20th century American literature.
Despite the success of the book, which was later adapted into a film starring Gregory Peck as lawyer Atticus Finch, Lee chose to shun the spotlight throughout her life, and widely declared that she would not publish more novels.
However, a second novel, Go Set a Watchman, considered to be an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, was eventually published in 2015, when Lee was 88.
A further eight short stories written in her youth were discovered in her New York apartment after she died. The stories, along with non-fiction essays, are now being published in a collection titled The Land of Sweet Forever.
The author’s nephew Ed Lee Conner told the BBC that the “apprentice stories” are not “the fullest expression of her genius and yet there’s genius in them”.
“She was a brilliant writer in the making and you see something of her brilliance in these stories,” he added.
His cousin Molly Lee, the writer’s niece, said that she was “very pleased” that the stories had been found, as “it’s interesting to see how her writing evolved and how she worked on her craft”.
“Even I can tell how she improved,” she added.
When asked by the BBC about whether publishing the stories posthumously might be seen as an invasion of privacy for the notoriously publicity-shy Lee, her nephew stressed that she “attempted to publish all these stories” during her lifetime.
The 2015 publication of Go Set a Watchman drew significant controversy in the literary world, with some critics and readers raising concerns that the elderly Lee, who suffered a stroke in 2007 and dealt with significant health issues afterwards, might have felt pressured into releasing this early work.
However, Lee released a statement after the publication stating that she was “alive and kicking and happy as hell with the reactions to Watchman”.
The Land of Sweet Forever will be released on 21 October.
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