The associate professor of communications and Pulitzer Prize recipient wrote a review of author Harper Lee's long-awaited second book for The (Raleigh) News & Observer.
From Skube’s review: “In transforming ‘Watchman’ into ‘Mockingbird,’ Lee produced an unrecognizably different novel, even though Atticus Finch and Scout are at the center of both. But this is not the Atticus readers thought they knew.”
Published on July 14, the book has made headlines for its depiction of Atticus Finch as a racist and bigot. Nonetheless, book sales have been staggering with more than 1.1 million copies sold in North America in its first week, according to The New York Times.
Skube’s review touches on several topics, including the story’s racial strife and tensions, as well as the novel’s use of offensive language. In fact, Skube points out that Lee’s novel – originally written in the mid-1950s – predicts several outcomes of the civil rights movement.
According to HarperCollins Publishers, “Go Set a Watchman” was the novel Lee first submitted to her publishers before “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014.
Skube wrote: “Little wonder, then, that “Go Set a Watchman” should be the most remarkable story in publishing in years, with a first printing of 2 million copies and all manner of attendant publicity.”
Skube is a former book editor at The (Raleigh) News & Observer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Distinguished Commentary in 1989, while he was working for the Raleigh-based paper. He has also served as a Pulitzer Prize juror many times and chaired several Pulitzer juries.