Harper Lee's short stories to appear in a new collection for the first time

For years before she published To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), American author Harper Lee wrote short stories with themes that she would explore in that now-classic novel: small town gossip and politics, tender and tense relationships between fathers and daughters, race relations.

- Alexandra Alter

NEW YORK - For years before she published To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), American author Harper Lee wrote short stories with themes that she would explore in that now-classic novel: small town gossip and politics, tender and tense relationships between fathers and daughters, race relations.

She tried and failed to get them published. Scholars and biographers have long thought the stories were lost or destroyed.

But Lee was a meticulous archivist. She stashed the typescripts of the stories, along with the rejection letters, in her New York City apartment, where her executor discovered them after her death in 2016 at the age of 89.

Those stories will be published for the first time in a collection titled The Land Of Sweet Forever.