Wondering About Harper Lee

Harper Lee has died, leaving behind something that, as writers, we all aspire to…words that will live forever. To Kill a Mockingbird makes all the lists: must-read

classics, banned books, bestselling books, Pulitzer Prize winners, book most likely to be assigned by your high school English teacher.

Then just last year, long after it had become an accepted fact that Harper Lee would only publish one book an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird was released. Although many people rushed to bookstores after waiting for this book for 55 years, I have not yet read Go Set a Watchman. So I cannot comment on the book's content. But I have thought about it. Not about reading it as much as about the circumstances of the publication. After a lifetime or privacy (the Greta Garbo of the literary world), in her golden years Lee was suddenly back in the spotlight. I wondered “Did she truly want this?” I worry that perhaps she didn’t but was just too tired to argue. It seemed strange to me that, at a time when people are becoming even more firmly set in their ways, Lee made an abrupt change. But I know nothing of Lee, her advisors or publishers. It is only something that makes me wonder.

If Lee is like every other writer I know she did not write just these two novels. There will be other journals, scribblings, abandoned short stories, finished works that just weren’t quite right in her eyes, perhaps even some truly horrible poetry (no reflection on Lee’s talent, just my own when it comes to poetry). Now that she is gone will we next see a publication of her personal diaries or other writings? Would she want that? I wonder.

I don’t know about all writers but I know I have a hard time parting with anything I’ve ever written (I have something in common with Harper Lee!). Even the manuscripts that my son would describe as “epic fails” are stuffed in the box under my bed or transferred to the “old files” file in my computer. And there they sit, waiting…for what? What if, after I die, my grandchildren decide to publish that horrible love triangle romance I wrote when I was 20 thinking “grandma would have wanted to see it published”? Of course this is less an issue for me than for writers who have made a name for themselves as successful writers. After a writer’s death should their heirs have the right to go under the bed to drag out the old manuscripts, crack the computer password to get to their files or peruse personal journals for publishable materials?

Can you save the your failed works and still prevent them from being published? Do you think a writer’s wishes about their work should be respected after their death?