In several years before "To Kill a Mockingbird" ("The Deadly Sin" in Swedish translation) was published, Harper Lee had written short stories with themes that she would later explore in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel: small-town gossip and politics, tender and tense relationships between fathers and daughters, and racial relationships.
However, she failed to get them published, and literary researchers have long believed that the stories were lost or destroyed. But Lee was a meticulous archivist.
She saved the typed short stories along with the rejection letters in her apartment in New York, where her estate found them after her passing in 2016.
This fall, they will be published for the first time in a collection titled "The Land of Sweet Forever", writes The New York Times.
The short story collection, to be published on October 21 by Harper Collins publishing house, contains eight previously unpublished stories and eight other texts that Lee published in various channels between 1961 and 2006. These include a portrait of her friend, author Truman Capote, a cornbread recipe, and a letter to Oprah Winfrey.
