She revealed a world through a child’s eye
To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee is dead at 89
Harper Lee was an ordinary woman as stunned as anybody by the extraordinary success of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“It was like being hit over the head and knocked cold,” Lee — who died Friday at age 89, according to publisher Harper-Collins — said during a 1964 interview, at a time when she still talked to the media.
“I didn’t expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.”
“To Kill a Mockingbird” may not be the Great American Novel. But it’s likely the most universally known work of fiction by an American author over the past 70 years, that rare volume to find a home both in classrooms and among voluntary readers, throughout the country and beyond.
Lee was cited for her subtle, graceful style and gift for explaining the world through a child’s eye, but the secret to the novel’s ongoing appeal was also in how many books this single book contained. “To Kill a Mockingbird” was a coming of age story; a courtroom thriller; a Southern novel; a period piece; a drama about class; and, of course, a drama of race.
“All I want to be is the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” she once observed.
The story of Lee is essentially the story of her book, and how she responded to it. She wasn’t a bragger, like Norman Mailer, or a misanthrope like J.D. Salinger or an eccentric or tormented genius. She was a celebrity who didn’t live or behave like a celebrity.
By the accounts of friends and Monroeville residents, she was a warm, vibrant and witty woman who played golf, fished, ate at McDonald’s, fed ducks by tossing seed corn out of a Cool Whip tub, read voraciously and got about to plays and concerts. She just didn’t want to talk about it before an audience.
“To Kill a Mockingbird”was an instant and ongoing hit, published in 1960, as the civil rights movement was accelerating. It’s the story of a girl nicknamed Scout growing up in a Depression-era Southern town. A black man has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and Scout’s father, the resolute lawyer Atticus Finch, defends him despite threats and the scorn of many.
Praised by The New Yorker as “skilled, unpretentious, and totally ingenious,” the book won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a memorable movie in 1962, with Gregory Peck winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus.
“Mockingbird” inspired a generation of young lawyers and social workers, was assigned in high schools all over the country and was a popular choice for city-wide, or nationwide, reading programs, although it was also occasionally removed from shelves for its racial content and references to rape.
By 2015, sales topped 40 million copies. When the Library of Congress did a survey in 1991 on books that have affected people’s lives, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was second only to the Bible.
Lee herself became more elusive to the public as her book became more famous. At first, she dutifully promoted her work. She spoke frequently to the press, wrote about herself and gave speeches, once to a class of cadets at West Point.
But she began declining interviews in the mid-1960s and, until late in her life, firmly avoided making any public comment about her novel or her career. Claudia Durst Johnson, author of a book-length critical analysis of Lee’s novel, described her as preferring to guard her privacy “like others in an older generation, who didn’t go out and talk about themselves on Oprah or the Letterman show at the drop of a hat.” According to Johnson, Lee also complained that the news media invariably misquoted her.
Other than a few magazine pieces for Vogue and McCalls in the 1960s and a review of a 19th century Alabama history book in 1983, she published no other work until stunning the world in 2015 by permitting the novel “Go Set a Watchman” to be released.
“Watchman” was written before “Mockingbird,” but was set 20 years later, using the same location and many of the same characters. The tone was far more immediate and starker than for “Mockingbird” and readers and reviewers were disheartened to find an Atticus nothing like the hero of the earlier book.
The man who defied the status quo in “Mockingbird” was now part of the mob in “Watchman,” denouncing the Supreme Court’s ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional and denouncing blacks as unfit to enjoy full equality.
But despite unenthusiastic reviews and questions whether Lee was well enough to approve the publication, “Watchman” jumped to the top of bestseller lists within a day of its announcement and remained there for months. Critics, meanwhile, debated whether “Watchman” would damage Lee’s reputation, and the legacy of Atticus as an American saint.
Born in Monroeville, Nelle Harper Lee was known to family and friends as Nelle (pronounced Nell) — the name of a relative, Ellen, spelled backward. Like Atticus Finch, her father was a lawyer and state legislator. One of her childhood friends was Truman Capote, who lived with relatives next door to the Lees for several years.
Capote became the model for Scout’s creative, impish and loving friend Dill. In the novel, Dill is described as “a pocket Merlin, whose head teamed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.”
Lee’s friendship with Capote was evident later when she travelled frequently with him to Kansas, beginning in 1959, to help him do research for what became his own bestseller, the “nonfiction” novel “In Cold Blood.” He dedicated the book to her and his longtime companion, Jack Dunphy, but never acknowledged how vital a role she played in its creation.