Harper Lee May Have Written A Third Novel, Lawyer Says

A lawyer representing Harper Lee claims the celebrated author of "To Kill A Mockingbird" may have written a third novel.

In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Tonja Carter, the attorney responsible for Lee's estate, says she stumbled across "a stack of a significant number of pages of another typed text" in a safe-deposit box last week -- the same box in which she found what's likely the original script for "To Kill A Mockingbird," and its soon-to-be-released parent novel, "Go Set A Watchman."

"Was it an earlier draft of 'Watchman,' or of 'Mockingbird,' or even, as early correspondence indicates it might be, a third book bridging the two? I don't know," Carter remarked. She says the mystery pages have been handed over to experts for further review.

Lee, who is now 89 years old and lives in an assisted living community, will see her second novel released amid some controversy on Tuesday, 55 years after the widely acclaimed "Mockingbird" first hit shelves.

The followup, titled "Go Set A Watchman," was actually written several years prior to "Mockingbird," but remained unpublished at the insistence of her editors, Lee said in a statement earlier this year.

"It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman and I thought it a pretty decent effort,” said Lee in the statement. “My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout. I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told.”