In July 2015, fifty-five years after To Kill a Mockingbird, a second Harper Lee novel appeared in bookstores, and it did something almost no publishing event before it had done: it damaged one of literature's most beloved characters on purpose, or at least on the page. Go Set a Watchman shows Atticus Finch in his seventies, attending a segregationist citizens' council meeting, and it arrived surrounded by real, documented questions about whether an elderly, ailing Harper Lee had genuinely consented to its release. This review covers what the book actually is, what happened with the manuscript's discovery and the elder-abuse inquiry that followed, what critics at USA Today and The Washington Post actually said, and where the honest reader response landed once the initial shock wore off.
What Go Set a Watchman Actually Is
This is, technically, Harper Lee's first novel, not her second -- a fact that matters enormously for how to read it and that the 2015 marketing campaign mostly avoided emphasizing. Lee wrote it in the mid-1950s and submitted it to editor Tay Hohoff, who saw promise in the flashback sequences to Scout's childhood and asked Lee to rework the entire book from that child's-eye perspective instead. That extensive rewrite became To Kill a Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman is essentially the original draft that Mockingbird grew out of, set roughly twenty years after Mockingbird's events, following a 26-year-old Jean Louise "Scout" Finch on a visit home to Maycomb, Alabama, from New York City, where she discovers that her father, Atticus, has been attending meetings of a local segregationist citizens' council. The plot follows Scout's reckoning with that discovery -- realizing the father she idolized as a child holds views she finds genuinely abhorrent as an adult.
About Harper Lee and the Real Story Behind This Book's Publication
Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, and was a childhood friend of Truman Capote, who later became the model for the character Dill in both novels. She attended the University of Alabama, studied law without completing her degree, and moved to New York City, where she worked as an airline reservation clerk while writing. To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 and made Lee famously, deliberately reclusive -- she gave almost no interviews and published no further novels for over five decades. That's what makes Go Set a Watchman's 2015 appearance so unusual on its own terms, and why the circumstances of its rediscovery drew so much scrutiny. Lee's lawyer, Tonja Carter, announced in 2014 that she had found the manuscript in a safe deposit box, though other accounts indicate it had actually been known to Carter and others since at least 2011. Because the announcement came after the 2014 death of Lee's sister Alice, who had long managed Harper's affairs and reportedly opposed further publication, and because Lee herself was by then 88, in an assisted-living facility, and had impaired vision and hearing, an anonymous report to Alabama's Department of Human Resources and its Securities Commission raised formal elder-abuse concerns. Alabama authorities investigated and closed the case without taking action, and Lee's literary agent, Andrew Nurnberg, stated that Lee was delighted about the publication and was surprised anyone had raised the allegation. Lee died on February 19, 2016, seven months after the book's release.
How It Compares to To Kill a Mockingbird
Comparing the two books directly is complicated by the fact that one is a polished, five-years-in-development novel that won the Pulitzer Prize, and the other is essentially the unpolished manuscript that novel replaced. To Kill a Mockingbird filters its story through child-Scout's limited, moralizing perspective, which lets Atticus function as an unambiguous, near-mythic moral figure. Go Set a Watchman removes that filter entirely: adult Scout sees her father clearly, flaws included, and the novel is fundamentally about the disillusionment that comes with that clarity. Read as a genuine sequel, it's a shock and, for many readers, a betrayal of a beloved character. Read as what it actually is -- the raw material Lee's editor pushed her to transform into something else entirely -- it's a fascinating, if rougher, look at where Mockingbird's ideas originated, including some of the same courtroom material and family history reused in different form.
What Critics Actually Said
Rather than inventing a verdict, here's what was actually published about it:
“Is Atticus Finch, the noble hero of To Kill a Mockingbird, a racist?… It's distressing to see the great, saintly Atticus diminished.”— Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today
“[Watchman] asks us to see Atticus now not merely as a hero, a god, but as a flesh-and-blood man with shortcomings and moral failing… Herein lies the paradox at the heart of Watchman that many white Americans still cannot or will not comprehend.”— Natasha Trethewey, The Washington Post
Despite the mixed and often uneasy critical reaction, the commercial reception was enormous: it became the fastest-selling book in publisher HarperCollins's history at the time, debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and shipped with a first printing of roughly 2 million copies.
And the aggregate reader picture, for what it's worth:
Where Real Reviews Pushed Back
Beyond the emotional difficulty of an aged, prejudiced Atticus, the more technical criticism running through independent reviews is that the book simply reads like a draft -- because it is one. Pacing is uneven, some scenes feel unfinished or repetitive, and the courtroom flashback sequences, since reworked more successfully into Mockingbird, sit awkwardly alongside the main 1950s-set plot. USA Today's prediction that the book would end up "a footnote to literary history" reflects a broader critical judgment that Watchman is more valuable as an artifact showing how a masterpiece got made than as a standalone literary achievement on its own terms. There's also a separate, more serious strand of criticism directed not at the text but at the circumstances of its publication -- the timing after Alice Lee's death, the elder-abuse inquiry, and questions about whether an author who spent fifty-five years choosing not to publish a second novel would have made that same choice with full agency at 88. Alabama's investigation closed without findings of wrongdoing, but the underlying unease among literary critics and Lee's own longtime friends never fully went away.
On an Atticus Readers Weren't Prepared For
The single most consequential choice in the book is showing Atticus Finch, in his seventies, attending a segregationist citizens' council meeting and voicing views that directly contradict the moral clarity Mockingbird built him on. Trethewey's Washington Post framing -- that the book forces readers to see him as "a flesh-and-blood man with shortcomings and moral failing" rather than a saint -- is the most generous, and arguably the most historically honest, reading available: a white Southern lawyer in the 1950s holding paternalistic, segregationist views was a documented reality, not an aberration, and Lee's original draft may simply have reflected that reality more directly than the child's-eye mythology of Mockingbird allowed. Whether that historical honesty justifies the emotional cost to readers who grew up loving the earlier version of the character is a genuinely unresolved argument, one that split reviewers as much as ordinary readers.
On What the Manuscript's History Actually Tells Us
Understanding Go Set a Watchman as a genuine literary artifact rather than a betrayal requires understanding what editor Tay Hohoff actually did: she read this early draft, recognized that the flashback material to Scout's childhood was the strongest writing in the manuscript, and spent roughly two years working with Lee to rebuild an entire novel around that material instead. That's an unusually well-documented editorial relationship for a book this famous, and it reframes Watchman less as a sequel and more as a rare, real look at a legendary novel's rough first draft, warts and all -- something literary scholars and Lee's biographers have found genuinely valuable, even as casual readers expecting "more Mockingbird" were often disappointed or upset by what they found instead. Some material survived the rewrite almost intact -- courtroom scenes, family history, the town of Maycomb itself -- while other elements, including the entire structure and Atticus's characterization, were transformed almost beyond recognition. Reading the two books side by side, in the order they were written rather than the order they were published, gives a genuinely rare window into how much a strong editor can reshape raw material into a classic.
On the Ethics of Publishing an Author's Rejected First Draft
Beyond the specific elder-abuse inquiry, there's a broader ethical question the book's publication raised that outlasted the Alabama investigation: should a manuscript an author chose, for fifty-five years, not to publish ever be released at all, regardless of who consents on her behalf at the very end of her life. Lee herself never publicly explained why she set the original draft aside rather than revising it further after Mockingbird's success, and her decades of silence on the matter can be read multiple ways -- as simple satisfaction with what Mockingbird had already achieved, or as a quieter judgment that Watchman wasn't work she wanted associated with her name. That ambiguity is precisely why the publication remains contested among literary scholars even after the formal investigation closed without findings against anyone involved.
Key Takeaways
- The book was written before To Kill a Mockingbird, not after -- it's the original manuscript, not a true sequel, despite how it was marketed in 2015
- Its publication was accompanied by a real, formally investigated elder-abuse inquiry into whether an 88-year-old, visually and hearing-impaired Harper Lee had genuinely consented
- Atticus Finch's portrayal here directly contradicts the moral clarity of Mockingbird, and that contrast is the book's central, most controversial subject
- Critics were split between treating it as a fascinating literary artifact and treating it as an unpolished draft that shouldn't have been marketed as a standalone novel
Who This Book Is Actually For
Readers genuinely curious about literary history and how To Kill a Mockingbird actually came to exist, and anyone interested in a more historically honest, less mythologized portrait of a 1950s Southern lawyer's politics than Mockingbird's child narrator allowed. It's also worth reading for readers specifically interested in the real-world publishing controversy itself, independent of the text.
Who Should Read Something Else Instead
If you loved To Kill a Mockingbird and want more of that exact experience, this book will likely disappoint or upset you -- multiple critics said as much directly, and it's a fair warning to take seriously. Readers who want a polished, complete novel rather than an early draft with genuine structural rough edges should reread Mockingbird instead, or look toward Lee's only other completed and published work.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- A genuinely rare literary artifact -- the actual early draft that became one of the best-selling American novels of the twentieth century
- Offers a more historically grounded, less mythologized portrait of Southern racial politics in the 1950s than Mockingbird's child narrator provides
- Debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list with the fastest first-week sales in HarperCollins's history at the time
- The Washington Post's review treats its harder portrayal of Atticus as a legitimate, historically honest choice rather than simply a flaw
- Sparks genuine, substantive discussion about authorial consent, literary estates, and how classic characters age
Cons:
- Reads unmistakably like an early draft -- uneven pacing, underdeveloped scenes, and repetitive courtroom material
- Atticus Finch's segregationist views are genuinely difficult and, for many readers, irreconcilable with the character they loved
- Real, documented questions about whether Harper Lee fully consented to publication given her age and health at the time
- Goodreads rating of 3.31 out of 5 is notably lower than To Kill a Mockingbird's, reflecting a genuinely more divided reception
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Go Set a Watchman really a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird?
Not exactly. It was actually written first, in the mid-1950s, before Lee's editor asked her to rework it from young Scout's perspective, which eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird. It was marketed as a sequel on publication in 2015 because it's set roughly twenty years after Mockingbird's events, even though it was drafted earlier.
Was there really a controversy about whether Harper Lee consented to its publication?
Yes. An anonymous report to Alabama's Department of Human Resources and Securities Commission raised elder abuse concerns given Lee's age, 88 at the time, and her impaired vision and hearing. Alabama authorities investigated and closed the case without action, and Lee's literary agent said she was delighted about the book's publication.
What's the actual Goodreads rating?
3.31 out of 5 as of this writing, notably lower than To Kill a Mockingbird's rating -- reflecting how divisive the portrayal of an older, prejudiced Atticus Finch was among readers who came to the book expecting more of the original novel's tone.
What's the most common criticism of this book?
That it reads like an early draft rather than a finished, polished novel -- which, historically, is closer to the truth than the marketing suggested -- and that its portrayal of Atticus as harboring segregationist views is genuinely difficult for readers who loved the original character.
Sources & Further Reading
- Goodreads — Go Set a Watchman (aggregate rating, reader reviews)
- USA Today — Jocelyn McClurg review
- The Washington Post — Natasha Trethewey review
- NBC News — Harper Lee's agent addresses elder abuse allegations
- BookBrowse — summary and background
- PositiveLifes.com — free inspirational and life-changing PDF books
Final Verdict
Go Set a Watchman is best approached with expectations reset from the start: not a true sequel, but the rough, unpolished manuscript that eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird, published under genuinely disputed circumstances at the very end of its author's long, deliberately private life. Its portrait of an aging, prejudiced Atticus Finch is a real and legitimate gut punch for readers who loved the original, and the prose itself shows the rough edges of a first draft rather than a finished novel. Read as a literary artifact and a case study in how a classic actually got made, it's genuinely fascinating. Read expecting more of Mockingbird's warmth, it's very likely to disappoint you, and the documented critical and reader reaction backs that up.
Buy Day rating: 6.7/10