Forgotten Hollywood

Manny P. here…

    Most critics dismissed it as just a rough draft for To Kill a Mockingbird, and readers despaired over an aging, racist Atticus Finch. But Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman is still a million seller.

   HarperCollins has announced Monday that Go Set a Watchman in its combined print, electronic and audio formats has sold 1.1 million copies in the United States and Canada, a figure which includes first-week sales and months of pre-orders. The publisher stunned the world in February when it revealed that a second novel was coming from Lee, who had insisted To Kill a Mockingbird would be her only book.

  HarperCollins, where award-winning authors have included Michael Crichton and Veronica Roth, is calling Watchman its fastest seller in history. Truth be told, other books have sold much faster: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, published by Scholastic in 2007, sold 8.3 million copies in its first 24 hours.

   Watchman was completed before Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Mockingbird, but is set in the same Alabama community 20 years later. Critics and readers were startled to find Atticus disparaging blacks and condemning the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw segregation in public schools.

   Watchman was released July 14th and as of early Monday remains at #1 on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com, with Mockingbird also in the Top 10. HarperCollins has increased an initial print run of 2 million copies for Watchman to 3.3 million.

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   The Screen Actors Guild is recognizing Carol Burnett for her six decades in entertainment. The actors’ union announced Monday that Burnett will receive its 52nd Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual SAG Awards in January.

   Union President Ken Howard said that the 82-year-old entertainer is a creative dynamo and a comedic genius. Burnett got her start on stage, where television talent bookers spotted her. She joined the cast of The Garry Moore Show in 1959. She launched The Carol Burnett Show in 1967, which ran for 11 years and won 25 Emmy Awards.

   Burnett is working on a book about the success of her show set to be published next year.

Until next time>                               “never forget”

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2015 at 11:32 am and is filed under Blog by Manny Pacheco. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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