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Before she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Lee had written short stories in which she explored some of its themes and characters.
March 4, 2025, 8:00 a.m. ET
For years before she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee wrote short stories with themes that she would later explore in that now-classic novel: small town gossip and politics, tender and tense relationships between fathers and daughters, race relations.
She tried and failed to get them published. Scholars and biographers have long thought the stories were lost or destroyed.
But Lee was a meticulous archivist. She stashed the typescripts of the stories, along with the rejection letters, in her New York City apartment, where her executor discovered them after her death in 2016.
This fall, those stories will be published for the first time in a collection titled “The Land of Sweet Forever.” The book, out on Oct. 21 from Harper, includes eight previously unreleased stories and eight pieces of nonfiction that Lee published in various outlets between 1961 and 2006, including a profile of her friend, the writer Truman Capote, a cornbread recipe and a letter to Oprah Winfrey.
Lee’s nephew, Edwin Conner, said that he and other members of her family were thrilled that the stories were preserved, and can now reach a wide audience. The estate decided to publish them in 2024, according to Harper.
“She was not just our beloved aunt, but a great American writer, and we can never know too much about how she came to that pinnacle,” Conner said in a statement released by Harper.
