The evasions of smalltown Alabama: The Land of Sweet Forever, by Harper Lee, reviewed
Harper Lee’s writing career was brief, but her single novel became one of the most famous in American history. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) won the Pulitzer Prize, sold tens of millions of copies and remains a fixture of classrooms and popular memory. She published almost nothing else until Go Set a Watchman – an earlier draft of Mockingbird – appeared in 2015, just before her death and perhaps without her meaningful consent. The Land of Sweet Forever gathers apprentice stories written before Mockingbird, along with a few later magazine pieces. Most are slight and the volume is more commercial than literary. Yet the early stories show Lee testing the
