Harper Lee’s lawyer Tonja Carter was instrumental in the publication of Lee’s new book, Go Set a Watchman, and for her next trick, Carter hints that Lee might have another unpublished manuscript in store. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal called “How I Found the Harper Lee Manuscript,” Carter reveals how she accidentally found the Watchman manuscript in Lee’s safe-deposit box in 2011, during a Sotheby’s appraisal of the author’s assets. At first, she writes, she thought the manuscript was simply an earlier Mockingbird draft, but after learning of the existence of Watchman from Lee’s family, she went back to the pages and realized she had an entirely new novel on her hands. With the new book set for publication, Carter says she recently went back to the safe-deposit box to sift for more literary gold. “What we found was extraordinary and surprised even me,” she writes: the original draft of Mockingbird, a Watchman manuscript, and also a “significant number of pages” of something else. “Was it an earlier draft of Watchman, or of Mockingbird, or even, as early correspondence indicates it might be, a third book bridging the two?” Carter indicates a group of experts are currently investigating the pages — all, of course, under Lee’s “direction.”
