Famous Writers:
To Catch A Mockingbird
For more than 40 years, Harper Lee has embraced a lifestyle reminiscent of Boo Radley, the unforgettable recluse she created in her only novel, To Kill A Mockingbird.
Unlike mockingbirds, Lee sightings are rare. Like Boo, it takes something special to entice Lee to emerge. In 1993, she and 30 other University of Alabama female graduates were honored in Tuscaloosa. In 1997, she attended graduation at Spring Hill College in Mobile to accept an honorary doctorate. Her privacy was guaranteed, and she did not deliver a speech. In May 2005, when she accepted an award from the Los Angeles Public Library, her only comment was, “I’ll say it again; thank you all from the bottom of my heart.”
Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, on April 28, 1926, the youngest of four children born to Frances Finch Lee and Amasa Coleman Lee. She always maintained that her novel is not autobiographical, that it simply evokes a time and place she knew well. But her father unquestionably inspired Atticus Finch, and Truman “Bulldog” Persons (later Capote), her diminutive childhood playmate, was clearly the model for Dill, Scout and Jem’s peculiar friend.
In the early 1950s, just short of a law degree from the University of Alabama, Lee moved to New York City to write. She once said To Kill A Mockingbird “…was like Topsy; it just grew.” The J. B. Lippincott editors liked the manuscript, but thought it shapeless. A Christmas gift of money from friends enabled Lee to take time off from her job to revise the book. Finally one editor said, “It might not sell even 20,000 copies, but we love Nelle.”
Publication came at the onset of the civil rights movement. Told in honest, provocative, easy to understand prose, Lee's depiction of racial segregation and discrimination in the South opened the eyes and minds of Northerners and Southerners alike. Writer Mark Childress believes Mockingbird did more to alter Southern attitudes about race than any other work of art in the 20th century.
Within a year of its 1960 publication, over a half million copies had sold. The book spent 80 weeks on bestseller lists and was serialized in Reader's Digest. Lee won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a string of other honors.
Today there are some 30 million copies of Mockingbird in print. First Editions bring high prices at auction. It has been translated into 40 languages, and is assigned reading in many schools. Popular with ninth grade students, the reasons given were that it fit with a growing realization that life is not a fairy tale, and they admire the moral fiber of Atticus Finch. One Northern Virginia student said, “It taught me to see other points of view.” Another said, “It speaks to small town ideals and racism, important topics.”
Gregory Peck, who played Atticus in the movie, called it his favorite role. On the set, when Lee commented that he had a pot belly like her father’s, Peck replied, “That’s not a pot belly. It’s good acting.” She gave him her father’s pocket watch, which he wore the night he accepted an Oscar for his performance.
Lee’s only other published works were four essays, three in magazines; one in an anthology. In her last known interview, in 1964, for Roy Newquist’s book, Counterpoint, she said she never expected her novel to do well, that she simply hoped someone might like it enough to give her encouragement. The massive attention, however, “...was one of sheer numbness. It was like being hit over the head and knocked cold.”
Asked about a rumored second novel, she replied, “It goes ever so slowly. I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I would like to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world. I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said about it, and something to lament in its passing.” She added, “In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”
If there ever was another manuscript, perhaps it’s tucked away in an old chifforobe, like the one Tom Robinson broke apart for Miss Mayella in Mockingbird.
When the book was re-released in 1993, Lee wrote the Forward. She said, in part, “Please spare Mockingbird an Introduction. As a reader, I loathe Introductions. I associate Introductions with long gone authors and works that are being brought back into print after years of internment. Although Mockingbird will be 33 this year, it has never been out of print and I'm still alive, although very quiet. Mockingbird still says what it has to say, it has managed to survive the years without preamble.”
Atticus Finch once explained to Scout that it's a sin to kill a mockingbird because they harm no one and give only pleasure with their singing. Later, Sheriff Tate advises Atticus that he plans to tell the townsfolk that Bob Ewell fell on his knife, rather than reveal that Boo Radley stuck a knife into Ewell to save the Finch children from harm. Tate says, “I never heard tell that it's against the law for a citizen to do his utmost to prevent a crime from being committed, which is exactly what he did, but maybe you'll say it's my duty to tell the town all about it and not hush it up. Know what'd happen then? All the ladies in Maycomb includin' my wife'd be knocking on his door bringing angel food cakes. To my way of thinkin', Mr. Finch, taking the one man who's done you and this town a great service an' draggin' him with his shy ways into the limelight---to me, that's a sin.”
Overhearing this, Scout tells Atticus that Mr. Tate is right. When Atticus asks what she means, the little girl says, “Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?”
If Nelle Harper Lee wants no angel food cakes, no interviews, it would be rude to invade her privacy. Folks in Monroeville refute the notion that she’s a recluse, saying she socializes but does not like publicity. Ironically, at the same time they’re protecting their famous resident, they’ve built a cottage industry of tourism around her. The 1903 courthouse has a Harper Lee/Truman Capote exhibit, and it’s the setting for an annual play based on Mockingbird. The production is always sold out but, reportedly, Lee has never attended. The Alabama Bar Association erected a monument in Monroeville to Atticus Finch, Lee’s fictional lawyer. Such is the power of her memorable characters. The benevolent ghosts of Maycomb hold sway with a tenacious force that frays the line between fiction and reality.
Despite wearing a mantle of mystery, Harper Lee remains a literary giant. Her timeless story, rich in its sense of place, voice, plot and characterization, is everything a novel should be. Her words give pleasure to first-time readers and to those who read her book again and again. Whether she likes it or not, she's a curiosity, whose presence fans must conjure through imagination and by borrowing a few of her words.
Envision a pleasant summer evening, after a sweltering day during which “…ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”
Children’s voices echo off the honeysuckle scented air. Mockingbirds chatter in a live oak, its branches laden with Spanish moss twisting in the breeze. Wearing a flowered frock, the snowy-haired Miss Nelle glides on the porch swing, hands in her lap; content. She’s "a proper Southern lady," the kind Aunt Alexandra hoped Jean Louise (Scout) would become, one of those women the precocious child described as, "fragrant ladies who rocked slowly, fanned gently, and drank cool water."