Harper Lee will publish a second novel

People went to see the fifth Star Wars even though the fourth was terrible.

People went to see the sixth Star Wars even though the fifth was terrible.

People going to go see the seventh Star Wars even though the sixth was terrible.

 

To be fair, those were following three beloved movies and they had decent moments among all the crap.

Also, the sixth wasn't terrible. It just suffers greatly in comparison to the first three.

 

He took it reluctantly, but he also took it because he knew it was the right thing to do. Judge Taylor knew that no one else was right for the case except for Atticus. And the chapter with Tim Johnson (the rabid dog) was a symbol for how Atticus took on something that no else wanted to do ... not even the sheriff, Heck Tate.

 

Actually, the consensus critical rating has Ep. 3 ranked ahead of Ep. 6 and fairly close to Ep. 4 (the original 'Star Wars').

Nobody much argues in favor of 1/2 any more.

 

The sixth is as good as any of the original three. The fifth is reasonably good. The fourth is mediocre -- not terrible.

 

I've become increasingly convinced as I get older that the original three are completely mediocre in and of themselves.

 

What killed those movies for me -- beyond Jar Jar Binks -- is that you should want to root for Anakin even though you know he will become Darth Vader.

But that kid who played him in Ep. 4 was such a surly little brat and Hayden Christiansen was so moody, near comatose and still unlikable that it certainly didn't seem tragic that he went bad.

 

Those were finished, edited movies.

"Watchman" is a work-in-progress. After the publisher said that it wanted "To Kill a Mockingbird," Harper Lee and at least one main editor (and probably some others) worked on it for nearly two years to make it what it is. Apparently, some of "Watchman" was incorporated into that.

If Lee would have wanted it published, it would have been, long ago.

I think that the "Watchman" marketing ploy is probably happening because Lee is old, has had a stroke and the sister who largely managed her affairs and gave her advice is dead.

 

The "Star Wars" prequels are all terrible, and I'm a "Star Wars" fan.

 

There have been some stories about the relationship between Alice and Nelle Harper Lee that indicate the sisters may not always have seen eye to eye on how the legacy of TKAMB should be presented.

From some of these accounts, Alice often took a domineering attitude toward her 17-years-younger sibling, who may have bristled under such conditions.

Of course when siblings reach their senior citizen years (or in the cases of the Lees, even older than that) everybody thinks all those childhood rivaly/resentment things are all over with, but who knows?

As the maternal older (and more accurately, eldest) sister, Alice may have felt it was her duty (or prerogative) to protect the image of their father. Maybe Alice knew GSAWM was going to present Atticus/Amasa in a less flattering light than TKAMB and she just decided to sit on it for those reasons.

Maybe Nelle Harper Lee made a decision years ago that as long as Alice was alive, GSAWM would remain in the can, and then when Alice died she would finish it up and put it out.

But this plan didn't account for Alice living to over 100 and Nelle herself being in her late eighties and infirm by the time this all came to pass, so the plan that she was going to swing back into active-writer mode and give GSAWM a complete final polishing went out the window.

So under the circumstances she could have just said, "oh the hell with it, put it out for better or worse, if people like it that's great, but if they don't, who gives a shit."

 

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think Starman is on to something (as opposed to merely ON SOMETHING, which is how I usually feel about his posts).

 

The minor carps people have brought up over duplicated passages between the two books and the inconsistent outcome of the Tom Robinson trial lead me to believe the above theory is probably the Occam's Razor most likely explanation.

Those are the kinds of things a writer would probably figure could be fixed up in a couple months if and when they decided to put the book out.