More than half a century after the release of To Kill a Mockingbird, HarperCollins announced the controversial release of its sort-of sequel, Go Set a Watchman. Questions abounded about whether author Harper Lee's lawyer, Tonja Carter, had coerced the elderly writer into releasing a second book. Lee is reportedly mostly deaf and blind, and it's been unclear exactly how her manuscript, written before Mockingbird, was discovered.
Carter attempted to set the record straight by authoring an article in The Wall Street Journal, in response to a New York Times report she takes issue with. Carter walks through her version of events, in which she, in looking through Lee's safe deposit box to evaluate her assets in 2011, came across a manuscript she assumed was an early draft of Mockingbird. But she had noticed mention of a character named Hank, who doesn't exist in the classic. It wasn't until 2014, she says, that she truly discovered Watchman and got Lee's permission to read it.
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