Report questions 'Watchman' discovery

A report in The New York Times is raising questions about whether Go Set a Watchman, the new Harper Lee novel being published to great fanfare on July 14, was discovered earlier than thought.

The announcement in February that the novel, a sequel of sorts to To Kill a Mockingbird featuring a grown Scout Finch, had been found shocked the literary world.

Lee's lawyer, Tonja B. Carter, says she came across Watchman last August, affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird.

But The Times says the manuscript, written in the 1950s and thought lost, may have been first seen in 2011, when Justin Caldwell of Sotheby's auction house went to Alabama to meet with Carter and Samuel Pinkus, Lee's literary agent at the time, to appraise a Mockingbird manuscript for insurance purposes.

On Thursday, Lee's publisher issued this statement: "HarperCollins was first informed of the discovery of the manuscript of Go Set a Watchman by Tonja Carter and Andrew Nurnberg (Lee's literary agent) in 2014. We were not aware of the 2011 meeting, however we have no reason not to believe Carter's account."

The announcement of Watchman's discovery and pending publication followed the death of Lee's protective older sister, Alice Lee. In a statement released in February, Harper Lee was quoted saying: "In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called Go Set a Watchman. It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout's childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout. I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn't realized it had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years."

Since then, questions have been raised about Lee's health and involvement in the new book. She is 89 and lives in an assisted living facility. But a few months ago, an inquiry by Alabama officials found no evidence that Lee had been manipulated into publishing what will be only her second novel, and the case was closed.

Charles J. Shields talks about Lee's work on Go Set a Watchman in his 2006 biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. On Thursday, he saw the dispute over when the Watchman manuscript was discovered – "who knew what and when did they know"-- to be of little significance.

"All talk, no Boo," he told USA TODAY, referring to Boo Radley, the famous character in Mockingbird.

The real test, Shields says, will be just how good Watchman is.