The Land of Sweet Forever is one of the literary events of 2025: a new book by Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, comprising 8 unpublished short stories - two of which feature her immortal character Jean Louise Finch - and 8 previously published nonfiction pieces.
According to her biographer Casey Cep’s illuminating introduction, Lee was something of a hoarder and she left behind many boxes of papers dating back decades when she died in 2016 (interestingly, for someone so closely associated with small towns, she apparently lived in New York for most of her adult life!).
When clearing out her apartment after her death, these short stories - written before Go Set a Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird - were happily discovered (those who knew of them thought they were lost to history) and here they are for her fans to enjoy.
And enjoy them I did - The Land of Sweet Forever is a wonderful book that made me wish, as I always do when I read Harper Lee, that she had written more than she did.
The stories feature themes that were clearly on her mind years before Mockingbird came into existence - the magic of childhood, Southern race relations, ignorance and justice - and would later develop and be worked into her masterpiece. The Water Tank is about a very young adolescent girl uncertain of how sex works and believes she is pregnant after hugging a boy whose pants were down! The Cat’s Meow is about an educated black man working as a gardener for, ostensibly, Lee’s older sister, and his mysterious circumstances and questionable fate.
There are a trio of stories that take place outside of Lee’s beloved Alabama, in New York, and show us a different side to her usual narrative focus. This is Show Business? is about a young woman driving around someone on a film crew as they run various errands around the city and she has to avoid getting a ticket while parking outside different establishments.
The other two are the only two stories here I disliked. A Roomful of Kibble is an instantly-forgettable tale of an old schoolfriend’s boring life in New York, while The Viewers and the Viewed is about a New York cinema that’s used for test screenings and where the audiences get very vocal. Maybe she was trying to write the kinds of stories that got accepted at the New Yorker and other publications at the time, or she was trying something different, but they’re pretty bad stories.
(Amusingly, in The Viewers and the Viewed, one of Lee’s joke titles for movies - The Quick and the Dead, a western - did actually get made into a real western movie by Sam Raimi in the ‘90s starring Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman and a very young Leonardo DiCaprio.)
The Pinking Shears is the first appearance of Lee’s two most famous creations. A headstrong young girl - here called Jean Louie Finch (missing the “S” to make her Louise, and not yet nicknamed Scout) - decides to improve the lot of a minister’s daughter who is afraid of her father’s wrath but hates that her hair is so long and unmanageable, wishing for short hair like Jean Louie’s. Also making an appearance is Jean Louie’s wise lawyer father, not yet named Atticus, simply called “Daddy” here. It’s a great story without the Mockingbird associations but made all the more exciting to see these two characters in utero.
The Land of Sweet Forever sees an older Jean Louise Finch return from New York City to Maycomb County and takes objection with the way her beloved home is slowly modernising. The bulk of the story concerns Jean Louise conducting a very esoteric conversation with a young student about theologists. In The Binoculars, a girl is chastised by her teacher for having learned to read before starting school, an episode that would later get worked into Mockingbird.
I might not have loved all 8 of the stories, but I certainly loved all 8 of the nonfiction pieces. They range from essays on love, children discovering the wonders of America, a recipe for crackling bread, a letter to Oprah recalling how she learned to read, her admiration of her celebrity friends Gregory Peck and Truman Capote, and a brilliant lecture on her favourite historian, Albert James Pickett.
The most moving piece is called Christmas to Me where some friends “buy” her a year off work - paying her rent and other bills - so that she could write. That year led to the creation of Mockingbird and the rest is history. As private as Lee was about her life, essays like this show you how wonderful a person she must’ve been to have friends who would do something like this for her, and to know the gift she had to give the world with her fiction.
Which is what The Land of Sweet Forever is: a hidden, now unearthed, literary gem. And, as much as I join the wishes of her other fans that she had written more books, this one shows us that she actually did only have the one - albeit incredible - story she wanted to tell. Most of the stories are very much Mockingbird in draft, much like Watchman was (even if it was ultimately presented as a sequel). Once it was done, so was she - why repeat herself?
But I’m still grateful for books like Watchman and Sweet Forever because Harper Lee had such a unique voice and the literary world would be lesser for not having more of her words in it. The Land of Sweet Forever is many things: a rare glimpse into the life of this very private writer; a fascinating look at how she was working up to one of the 20th century’s greatest novels; a reminder of her fine mind, quality character and enormous talent - but, above all, a collection of great stories. The Land of Sweet Forever is an excellent read - if you didn’t already know, anything with Harper Lee’s name on is worth reading.
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