On April 28, 2026, Harper Lee–author of To Kill a Mockingbird , one of the most widely read novels in American history–would have turned 100. Published in 1960, the novel earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year, securing her place in American letters and raising a question she would spend a lifetime trying to answer: what comes after a debut like that?

Lee, whose ambition was to be the “Jane Austen of South Alabama”–as she told radio host Roy Newquist in a rare 1964 interview–continued to write the rest of her life, spending eight hours on a single page, and became so absorbed she would go “for days and days and days without leaving my house.” Unfortunately, she did not deem anything fit for publication, and would in moments of writerly frustration destroy whatever progress she had made.

Journalist Casey Cep in her book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (2019) writes that the writer George Malko, her neighbour, was accustomed to a despairing Lee knocking…