Harper Lee's early short stories are released for the first time

For years before she published “To Kill the Mockingbirds,” Harper Lee wrote short stories on the theme. She will later explore in that modern classic novel. Small town gossip and politics, tender relationships between fathers and daughters, race relations.

She tried to publish them. Scholars and biographers have long thought that stories will be lost or destroyed.

But Lee was a meticulous archivist. She hid the story typescript along with a letter of rejection in an apartment in New York City where the executors discovered them after her death in 2016.

This fall, these stories will be revealed for the first time in a collection entitled “The Land of Sweet Forever.” The book, which went out from Harper on October 21, includes eight previously unpublished stories and eight non-fictions that Lee published in various outlets between 1961 and 2006.

Lee's nephew, Edwin Connor, said he and other members of her family are excited that the story has been preserved and can now reach a wide audience. According to Harper, the property has decided to open them in 2024.

“She is not only our beloved aunt, but also an American great writer, and we don't know much about how she came to the pinnacle,” Connor said in a statement released by Harper.

“The Land of Sweet Forever” adds a new layer to Lee's intricate heritage. After its release in 1960, “To Kill a Mockingbird” won a Pulitzer Prize and became a classic film starring Gregory Peck. Over 46 million copies were sold. Set in a small Alabama town modeled after Lee's hometown of Monroeville, it tells the story of a young girl named Jean Louise “Scout” Finch.

For decades, Killing the Mockingbirds stood as Lee's only published book, but many of her fans feared it would be her last. Later, in February 2015, Lee's publisher announced that he would publish his second novel, “Go Set a Watchman.” The novel's release attracted both praise and skepticism from those who questioned whether Lee had really wanted to publish it for years in the late '80s.

Her short fiction shows Lee experimenting with characters and themes.

“This wonderful little time capsule from her development as a writer,” Casey CEP, who writes an introduction to the collection, said in an interview. CEP is Lee's authorized biographer and author of “Fast Time: Murder, Fraud, and Harper Lee's Last Trial.”

The story is based on Lee's childhood in Alabama and her life as a young writer in Manhattan, where she eats at lunch and goes to the film. In one story, Lee writes about his driving and parking complaints in New York City.

Some of the stories set in the south reveal how Lee began developing Jean Louise Finch, a precocious and perceptual young narrator who “To Kill Mockingbirds.” The story, entitled “The Pinking Shears,” features a girl named Jean Louie, reappearing as a genre louis in the later story, “The Land of Sweet Forever.” The collection also includes a scan of the original TypeScripts containing Lee's notes.

“People will feel like they're sitting at her desk with her,” CEP said. “It feels like the first piece of Harper Lee's much bigger puzzle of life and work.”