GO SET A WATCHMAN

GO SET A WATCHMAN

Editorial:
HARPER COLLINS
Año de edición:
ISBN:
978-0-06-240986-7
Encuadernación:
Rústica
Colección:
HARPER COLLINS
Disponibilidad:
Disponible en 5 días

18,65 €

Originally written in the mid-1950s but unpublished until now, this novel inspired the beloved classic To Kill a Mockingbird and features many of the original characters. Visiting her father at her childhood home, the adult Scout is forced to confront her feelings about the place where she grew up.



Nelle Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016), better known by her pen name Harper Lee, was an American novelist widely known for To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960. Immediately successful, it won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature. Though Lee had only published this single book, in 2007 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to literature.[1] Additionally, Lee received numerous honorary degrees, though she declined to speak on those occasions. She was also known for assisting her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966).[2] Capote was the basis for the character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.[3]

The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old. The novel deals with the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as depicted through the eyes of two children. The novel was inspired by racist attitudes in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

Another novel, Go Set a Watchman, was written in the mid-1950s and controversially published in July 2015 as a "sequel", though it was later confirmed to be To Kill a Mockingbird's first draft.[4][5][6]

Contents

1 Early life
2 To Kill a Mockingbird
2.1 Origin
2.2 Autobiographical details in the novel
3 After To Kill a Mockingbird
3.1 Middle years
3.2 2005–2014
3.3 2015: Go Set a Watchman
4 Death
5 Fictional portrayals
6 Works
6.1 Books
6.2 Articles
7 References
8 External links

Early life

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, where she was raised,[7] the youngest of four children of Frances Cunningham (Finch) and Amasa Coleman Lee.[8] Her first name, Nelle, was her grandmother's name spelled backwards and the name she used.[9] Harper Lee was her pen name.[9] Lee's mother was a homemaker; her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, practiced law and served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1926 to 1938. Before A.C. Lee became a title lawyer, he once defended two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Both clients, a father and son, were hanged.[10] Lee had three siblings: Alice Finch Lee (1911–2014),[11] Louise Lee Conner (1916–2009), and Edwin Lee (1920–1951).[12]

While enrolled at Monroe County High School, Lee developed an interest in English literature. After graduating from high school in 1944,[8] she attended the then all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery for a year, then transferred to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she studied law for several years and wrote for the university newspaper, but did not complete a degree.[8]
To Kill a Mockingbird

I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.
—?Harper Lee, quoted in Newquist, 1964[13]

In 1949, Lee moved to New York City and took a job as an airline reservation agent, writing fiction in her spare time.[8] Having written several long stories, Lee found an agent in November 1956. The following month, at Michael Brown's East 50th Street townhouse, she received a gift of a year's wages from friends with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas."[14]
Origin

In the spring of 1957, a 31-year-old Lee delivered the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman to her agent to send out to publishers, including the now-defunct J. B. Lippincott Company, which eventually bought it.[15] At Lippincott, the novel fell into the hands of Therese von Hohoff Torrey—known professionally as Tay Hohoff. Ms. Hohoff was impressed. "[T]he spark of the true writer flashed in every line", she would later recount in a corporate history of Lippincott.[15] But as Ms. Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. It was, as she described it, "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel".[15] During the next couple of years, she led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled To Kill a Mockingbird.[15]

Like many unpublished authors, Ms. Lee was unsure of her talents. “I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told,” Ms. Lee said in a statement in 2015 about the evolution from Watchman to Mockingbird.[15] Ms. Hohoff offers a more detailed characterization of the process in the Lippincott corporate history: “After a couple of false starts, the story-line, interplay of characters, and fall of emphasis grew clearer, and with each revision — there were many minor changes as the story grew in strength and in her own vision of it — the true stature of the novel became evident.” (In 1978, Lippincott was acquired by Harper & Row, which became HarperCollins, publisher of Watchman.)[15]

There appeared to be a natural give and take between author and editor. “When she disagreed with a suggestion, we talked it out, sometimes for hours,” Ms. Hohoff wrote. “And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of country.”[15]

As for her relationship with Ms. Lee, it’s clear that Ms. Hohoff provided more than just editorial guidance. One winter night, as Charles J. Shields recounts in Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, Ms. Lee threw her manuscript out her window and into the snow, before calling Ms. Hohoff in tears. “Tay told her to march outside immediately and pick up the pages,” Mr. Shields writes.[15]

When the novel was finally ready, the author opted to use the name "Harper Lee", rather than risk having her first name Nelle be misidentified as "Nellie".[16]

Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate bestseller and won great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It remains a bestseller, with more than 30 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll by the Library Journal.[17]
Autobiographical details in the novel

Like Lee, the tomboy Scout of the novel is the daughter of a respected small-town Alabama attorney. Scout's friend, Dill, was inspired by Lee's childhood friend and neighbor, Truman Capote;[10] Lee, in turn, is the model for a character in Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948. Although the plot of Lee's novel involves an unsuccessful legal defense similar to one undertaken by her attorney father, the 1931 landmark Scottsboro Boys interracial rape case may also have helped to shape Lee's social conscience.[18]

While Lee herself downplayed autobiographical parallels in the book, Truman Capote, mentioning the character Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, described details he considered autobiographical: "In my original version of Other Voices, Other Rooms I had that same man living in the house that used to leave things in the trees, and then I took that out. He was a real man, and he lived just down the road from us. We used to go and get those things out of the trees. Everything she wrote about it is absolutely true. But you see, I take the same thing and transfer it into some Gothic dream, done in an entirely different way."[19]
After To Kill a Mockingbird
Middle years

After completing To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee accompanied Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to assist him in researching what they thought would be an article on a small town's response to the murder of a farmer and his family. Capote expanded the material into his best-selling book, In Cold Blood, published in 1966.

From the time of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird until her death in 2016, Lee granted almost no requests for interviews or public appearances and, with the exception of a few short essays, published nothing further, until 2015. She did work on a follow-up novel—The Long Goodbye—but eventually filed it away unfinished.[20] During the mid-1980s, she began a factual book about an Alabama serial murderer, but also put it aside when she was not satisfied.[20] Her withdrawal from public life prompted unfounded speculation that new publications were in the works.
A black and white photograph of Alan J. Pakula seated next to Harper Lee in director's chairs watching the filming of To Kill a Mockingbird
Film producer Alan J. Pakula with Lee, who spent three weeks watching the filming of To Kill a Mockingbird
in 1962.[21]

Lee said of the 1962 Academy Award–winning screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird by Horton Foote: "I think it is one of the best translations of a book to film ever made."[22] She became a friend of Gregory Peck, and after his death remained close to the actor's family; Peck's grandson, Harper Peck Voll, is named after her.[citation needed]

Peck won an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, the father of the novel's narrator, Scout.

In January 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Lee to the National Council on the Arts.[23]

In 1966, Lee wrote a letter to the editor in response to the attempts of a Richmond, Virginia, area school board to ban To Kill a Mockingbird as "immoral literature":
“ Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board's activities, and what I've heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read.

Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is 'immoral' has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.

I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.[10]


James J. Kilpatrick, the editor of The Richmond News Leader, started the Beadle Bumble fund to pay fines for victims of what he termed "despots on the bench". He built the fund using contributions from readers, and later used it to defend books as well as people. After the board in Richmond ordered schools to dispose of all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird, Kilpatrick wrote, "A more moral novel scarcely could be imagined." In the name of the Beadle Bumble fund, he then offered free copies to children who wrote in, and by the end of the first week, he had given away 81 copies.[24]

When Lee attended the 1983 Alabama History and Heritage Festival in Eufaula, Alabama, she presented the essay "Romance and High Adventure".[25]

Late in 1978, Lee spent some time in Alexander City, Alabama, researching a true-crime book called The Reverend.[26]
2005–2014

In March 2005, Lee arrived in Philadelphia – her first trip to the city since signing with publisher Lippincott in 1960 – to receive the inaugural ATTY Award for positive depictions of attorneys in the arts from the Spector Gadon & Rosen Foundation.[27] At the urging of Peck's widow, Veronique Peck, Lee traveled by train from Monroeville to Los Angeles in 2005 to accept the Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award.[28] She also attended luncheons for students who have written essays based on her work, held annually at the University of Alabama.[22][29] On May 21, 2006, she accepted an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame, where graduating seniors saluted her with copies of To Kill a Mockingbird during the ceremony.[30]

On May 7, 2006, Lee wrote a letter to Oprah Winfrey (published in O, The Oprah Magazine in July 2006) about her love of books as a child and her dedication to the written word: "Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books."[31]

Wikipedia

Otros libros del autor

  • TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
    Titulo del libro
    TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
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    'Shoot all the Bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a Mockingbird.'A lawyer's advi...
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    12,95 €

  • MATAR A UN RUISEÑOR
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    MATAR A UN RUISEÑOR
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    Disparad a todos los arrendajos azules que queráis, si podéis acertarles, pero recordad que es un pecado matar a un ...
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    9,90 €

  • MATAR UN RUISEÑOR (LA NOVELA GRÁFICA)
    Titulo del libro
    MATAR UN RUISEÑOR (LA NOVELA GRÁFICA)
    LEE, HARPER
    Uno de los grandes clásicos cabecera del siglo XX adaptada a novela gráfica. «Uno es valiente cuando, sabiendo que l...
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  • MATAR A UN RUISEÑOR
    Titulo del libro
    MATAR A UN RUISEÑOR
    LEE, HARPER
    Disparad a todos los arrendajos azules que queráis, si podéis acertarles, pero recordad que es un pecado matar a un ...
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    17,90 €

  • VE Y PON UN CENTINELA
    Titulo del libro
    VE Y PON UN CENTINELA
    LEE, HARPER
    Estamos ante uno de los grandes acontecimientos literarios de los últimos tiempos: la publicación de la primera nove...
    RECÍBELO EN 72H

    9,90 €