The American classic novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" has a sequel after all, which will be sold in bookstores more than six decades after it was written.

The author Harper Lee, 88, wrote "Go Set a Watchman" in the mid-1950's after finishing Mockingbird but her editor advised her to put it aside.

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To Kill a Mockingbird was first published in July 1960 and the book picked up a Pulitzer Prize. A couple of years later, the novel was shot into an Oscar-winning movie starring Gregory Peck.

The new novel, which features the popular character Scout Finch as a grown-up, will hit stores on July 14.  Harper Collins said it would initially print two million copies of the novel.

The book's publisher said, in the new novel, Scout is forced to deal with political and personal issues as she comes to terms with her father's attitude toward people and her own emotions over the town where she was born and raised.

The story happens in the fictional town of Maycomb in the mid-1950s, when Scout comes back from New York to see her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch.

Lee's lawyer discovered the manuscript last autumn, still attached to an original copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The author said she did not realize the original book had survived, so she was surprised when a friend, lawyer Tonja Carter, found it.

Lee said that after much consideration, she shared the novel with several people whom she trusted. She was pleased that they considered Watchman worthy of publication.

In a statement, Harper Collins expects Go Set a Watchman to be a remarkable literary event.  The publisher said Watchman, which reads in many ways like a sequel to Lee's classic work, is a compelling and ultimately worthy narrative about a daughter and father's relationship and life in a small Alabama town dealing with racial tensions in the 1950s. 

Tagsto kill a mockingbird, harper lee