Harper Lee's legacy grows

A new collection of early works adds to the writer's slim yet mighty canon.

- ROBERT ALLEN PAPINCHAK

BEN MARTIN Getty Images EARLY WORKS reinforce the distinct voice of Harper Lee (above, 1960).

Fortunately for avid bibliophiles, Harper Lee was an inveterate pack rat. Born in rural Monroeville, Ala., in 1926, the author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" — whose first name is Nelle — spent much of her adult life in Manhattan after moving there in 1949.

First she lived in a cold-water flat on the Upper East Side (subsisting on peanut butter sandwiches and meager bookstore and airline ticket agent salaries); then in a room in a Midtown hotel where Edith Wharton and Mark Twain once resided; a third-floor York Avenue walk-up ($20 a month for five years, where "Go Set a Watchman" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" were written); and finally, four decades at 433 E. 82nd St. There, amid "piles of her correspondence and practically every pay stub, telephone bill and canceled check ever issued to her, were notebooks and manuscripts" and eight previously unpublished early short stories and eight once-published essays and magazine articles. Those writings, discovered in her New York City apartment after she died in her Alabama hometown nine years ago, have been gathered into the welcome hybrid compendium “The Land of Sweet Forever.”