The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee

The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories and Essays

by Harper Lee

edited by Casey Cep

Random House 2025

For many young readers growing up in the years soon after the Civil Rights Movement, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird seemed to promise that even a society where racism and inequality echoed at every turn could follow a long arc towards justice if only people showed the quiet courage and compassion that young Scout, her brother Jem, and their father Atticus displayed. Many bookish youth dreamed that Lee would publish a follow-up novel about the Finches and their eccentric neighbors in Maycomb, Alabama, wondering how they would weather the enormous changes that were happening in American society.

The novel was an enormous success, soon winning the Pulitzer Prize. There were a few early critics who argued that To Kill a Mockingbird was too melodramatic and sentimental. A fair number of parents and teachers complained that the book was too frank about both racial and sexual violence to be read by young people. By the twenty-first century, though, even readers who had loved the novel for decades increasingly began to acknowledge its limitations. Poor white southerners in the novel are cast as unredeemable racists, while wealthier white characters are usually given a pass. Black characters (one portrayed as a unidimensional victim and the other as primarily a mother-substitute for white children) have extremely limited agency. The real heroes in Lee’s novel about racial justice are white people.

In the midst of increasing criticism of To Kill a Mockingbird, the long-held dream of the release of another Harper Lee novel suddenly came true. Published in 2015, a year before Lee’s death, Go Set a Watchman is set twenty years after the events that occur in To Kill a Mockingbird. Scout (who goes by Jean Louise) leaves her home in New York City to visit her father who still lives in Alabama. Time away from the South has allowed her to see the intense bigotry not only of her old hometown but also of her father, who is now active in the white Citizens’ Council, fighting against racial integration. Black citizens of the town were not ready for true equality, believes Atticus, and the Supreme Court was violating the doctrine of states’ rights. Jean Louise is horrified that the father she had long admired holds such discriminatory beliefs. Eventually, the two reach a sort of truce—one that involves making a decision to keep one’s mouth shut. Jean Louise can no longer see her father as a hero. Instead, she now recognizes that he is simply another flawed human being.

Although the setting of Go Set a Watchman suggests that the novel was a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, it was not. Instead, it was a preliminary draft—written several years before Mockingbird was published. When Lee submitted the draft in 1957, her editor felt it was not ready for publication. Instead, she suggested that Lee develop the flashbacks about Scout’s childhood faith in her father rather than further exploring her disillusionment with his beliefs and actions once she grew up.

Readers were as horrified by the Atticus of Watchman as Jean Louise was during her visit home. Mockingbird convinced us that justice was possible, while Watchman seemed to kill that mockingbird. Surely Harper Lee did not write such a thing, some argued. Even if she did write this draft back in the 1950s, many people believed that if Lee were still in her right mind, she would no longer want it to see the light of day. Perhaps in her old age she had just been duped by the controllers of her estate who wanted to make money off her fame. Even readers who championed Go Set a Watchman felt it was not as carefully crafted nor as expertly edited as To Kill a Mockingbird. Still, Watchman’s mature exploration and deep honesty about disillusionment with one’s childhood heroes make this novel worth reading not just as biographical artifact but as literature in its own right.

Unfortunately, that argument cannot be made for Lee’s The Land of Sweet Forever, released for publication late last month. In this collection are eight previously unpublished short stories written in the 1950s as well as a set of essays published after Lee achieved fame. All were found in her New York City apartment, where she had saved almost everything—from stories she submitted to their rejection letters, from pay stubs to telephone bills. Most of the nonfiction in the collection is forgettable, and none of the fictional pieces quite succeed as short stories.

Instead, the stories in this volume offer a window into Lee’s interior world as she sat down to write her first novel. She often wrote about small-town life in Alabama during a time of changing cultural dynamics. She was fascinated by the different words inhabited by children and adults and aware of both the dangers and possibilities those separations could entail. At the time, she was living in New York City and writing about the intrepid awkwardness she felt there—as well as the discomfort she experienced when she returned home for visits to what seemed like a different world full of family she didn’t know how to love anymore.

Some of the stories’ specific settings and situations appear in the later novels, but perhaps more interestingly, the differing tones Lee uses in the novels are already here in these stories: the innocent way of talking about the darkness of childhood in Mockingbird, the playful portrayal of quirky characters (sometimes in Maycomb and sometimes Manhattan), and also her anger and impatient wit which pervades much of Watchman. Here readers will find the Harper Lee who wrote both novels.

Hannah Joyner lives in Washington, D.C. Her books include Unspeakable and From Pity to Pride. You can find her on Booktube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.