The Land of Sweet Forever review: Long before To Kill a Mockingbird became a moral touchstone of American life, Nelle Harper Lee was just another young woman in a New York walk-up, eating peanut butter sandwiches and trying to turn memory into art. She built her desk from apple crates and a door, typed on a battered Underwood , and mailed stories to magazines that mostly sent them back.

Those tentative and funny stories are now gathered in The Land of Sweet Forever , a posthumous collection that promises to show us how Harper Lee became Harper Lee. The book, edited by her biographer Casey Cep, collects eight unpublished stories written in the 1950s and pairs them with short nonfiction pieces from later decades.

None are masterpieces, and Lee herself likely never meant them to

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