Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| To Kill a Mockingbird | 1960 |
| Go Set a Watchman | 2015 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| The Land of Sweet Forever | 2025 |
About Harper Lee
Harper Lee (1926 to 2016) was an American novelist whose 1960 novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 and has more than 40 million copies in print. She published only one other novel, “Go Set a Watchman” (2015), and a posthumous collection of stories and essays, “The Land of Sweet Forever” (2025).
Nelle Harper Lee was born on 28 April 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of four children. Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was a lawyer, a former newspaper editor and a member of the Alabama State Legislature. As a child she became friends with Truman Capote, who spent summers with relatives in the town. She studied law at the University of Alabama but left one semester short of a degree, and in 1949 moved to New York City, where she worked in a bookshop and as an airline reservation agent while writing in her spare time.
In December 1956 friends gave her a year’s wages as a Christmas present so that she could write full time. The manuscript she delivered in 1957, then titled “Go Set a Watchman”, was bought by J. B. Lippincott, where the editor Tay Hohoff guided her through successive drafts until it became “To Kill a Mockingbird”. The novel is set in the Deep South of the 1930s and looks at attitudes to race and class through the eyes of two children. Scout’s father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, defends a black man wrongly accused of rape. The character Dill was based on Capote.
The book was published on 11 July 1960 and was an immediate bestseller. The 1962 film adaptation, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, won three Academy Awards. Lee also helped Capote research the book that became “In Cold Blood”, travelling with him to Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959. In 2007 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“Go Set a Watchman” was published in July 2015, after her lawyer reported finding the manuscript. It was promoted as a sequel, with Scout returning to Maycomb as an adult some twenty years later, but it is now accepted to be an early draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Lee died in Monroeville on 19 February 2016, aged 89. “The Land of Sweet Forever”, published on 21 October 2025, brings together eight early short stories found after her death and eight previously published essays and magazine pieces, with an introduction by Casey Cep.