Harper Lee
American novelist who produced one greatly loved masterpiece in To Kill a Mockingbird
HARPER LEE, the American novelist, who has died aged 89, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for her first
published work, To Kill
a Mockingbird; more than 50 years later, however, the literary world was stunned by the revelation that the manuscript of an earlier novel, featuring many of the same characters, had been discovered.
To Kill a Mockingbird, which was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1962, sold more than 30 million copies and has never been out of print. But Harper Lee, whether from a desire for privacy, a terminal case of writer’s block or a sense that she could not repeat the critical and commercial success of her debut, never completed another book.
After a couple of interviews in the early 1960s she withdrew from public view, joining the pantheon of great American literary recluses headed by Thomas Pynchon and JD Salinger.
In To Kill a Mockingbird Scout Finch looks back on her childhood growing up in the 1930s in Maycomb, a fictional small town in Alabama identifiable both geographically and by its characters as Monroeville, where Harper Lee was raised.
The tale has two strands. The first describes the joys and sorrows, the little triumphs and minor disasters of childhood, told with a warmth and humour reminiscent of Mark Twain; the second strand depicts the routine racism in the southern states during the period and the attendant menace directed at Scout’s white family when their father defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white girl.
Harper Lee considered a small country town to be “the last refuge of eccentrics”. She lovingly portrayed a fictional community that was at once both particular and universal. White trash, country hicks, local gossips and bullying schoolchildren coexisted – not always harmoniously – with a putupon black community, a gentle and heroic recluse by the name of Boo Radley and Scout’s quirky and extended family, headed by her lawyer father, Atticus, a philosophical man of humanity and integrity.
Harper Lee’s years of silence left her book – a searing endictment of racism in the Deep South of America – to echo in her absence. “A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it,” stated The Washington Post on the novel’s publication, “will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Half a century later, in a bizarre turn of events which, as Gaby Wood noted in The Daily Telegraph, appeared to have “something of the quality of a hoax”, the typescript of a second novel was discovered – in a safe-deposit box kept by Harper Lee’s older sister Alice. Titled Go Set a Watchman (from Isaiah 21:6), and written before To Kill a
Mockingbird, the newly unearthed novel was published worldwide in July 2015.
“It’s not a sequel,” insisted Harper Lee, who was by now infirm, nearly blind and living in sheltered accomodation. “It’s the parent.” In 1957 she had submitted the draft of Go Set a
Watchman to her editor, Tay Hohoff, who responded that “there were many things wrong about it” including “dangling threads of a plot”, and after several years of redrafting what emerged was To Kill a Mockingbird.
Go Set a Watchman puzzled critics, many of whom felt it to be a work-inprogress, uneven in quality and tone, and with inconsistencies of plotting. Set 20 years after the time period of
Mockingbird and narrated in the third person, the novel follows Jean-Louise Finch (Scout as an adult) as she returns to Maycomb in the years when the civil rights movement was building momentum. Most alarmingly, the revered figure of Atticus, now an arthritic septuagenarian, has been transformed into a racist who was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Mick Brown in this newspaper considered the book’s main interest to be as “the first step to a literary masterpiece” but argued that “perhaps it would have been a greater kindness to her reputation, and to the millions who cherish To Kill a Mockingbird, not to have published it at all.” Nevertheless, Go Set a Watchman sold more than a million copies in the first week of sale alone.
Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, on April 28 1926. “In my home town, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read,” she recalled. “We’re talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression.” Harper was the youngest of three children born to wildly different parents. Her mother Frances was mentally unstable – she allegedly twice tried to drown Harper in the bath – while her father was a source of great pride. Amasa Coleman “AC” Lee was a lawyer with the firm Barnett, Bugg & Lee, a descendant of the Confederate General Robert E Lee, and is often said to be the inspiration for Atticus Finch.
Growing up in Monroeville, the tomboyish Harper found a kindred spirit in her friend Truman Capote, later the celebrated novelist and social butterfly, whom she portrayed in To
Kill a Mockingbird as the precocious Dill Harris. He in return would draw on her for the character of Idabel Tompkins in his novel Other Voices,
Other Rooms.
Harper Lee was educated locally and studied Law at the University of Alabama. In 1949 she spent a year at Oxford as an exchange student, after which she felt unable to return to Alabama. She left university without a degree and moved to New York City to further her ambition to be a writer. While writing essays and short stories, she supported herself by working as an airline reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and subsequently with BOAC.
Having received encouragement from the literary agent Maurice Crain, who suggested she work one of her short stories into a novel, Harper Lee gave up her job with financial assistance from friends and devoted herself to writing.
With her father ill, she divided her time between New York and Monroeville, the setting of her novel, and in 1957 she submitted a manuscript to the publisher JP Lippincott & Co. Tay Hohoff, her brilliant editor there, urged her to rewrite it, apparently advising her to set it earlier and narrate it from a child’s point of view. Speaking later of her collaboration with the author, Tay Hohoff explained: “When she disagreed with a suggestion, we talked it out, sometimes for hours. And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers.”
To Kill a Mockingbird was finally published in July 1960.
Its success, which was immediate, was based upon its exquisite yet unsentimental recreation of a vanished world. If the novel seemed simplistic in its morality, this only heightened the sense of the narrator’s childhood perceptions, revealed with a deceptive simplicity, as the town’s unthinking bigotry is recorded but never explicitly condemned. For it was, as Atticus said, “just as much Maycomb County as missionary teas”.
The critics were united in praise. If a question mark could be raised over the impartiality of Truman Capote, few argued with his conclusion: “Someone rare has written this very fine novel, a writer with the liveliest sense of life and the warmest most authentic humour. A touching book; and so funny, so likeable.”
The reviewers might have been writing about Harper Lee’s most admired author, Jane Austen; and Harper Lee might have been referring to herself when she described Austen as “writing, cameo-like in that little corner of the world of hers and making it universal”.
Some quarters, however, balked at her book’s subject matter. The board of Hanover County School, Virginia, attempted to ban it on the grounds of it being “immoral literature”. “Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board’s activities,” wrote Harper Lee to the board members, “and what I’ve heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read.
“To hear that the novel is ‘immoral’ has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of ‘doublethink’. I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore, I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enrol the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.”
The novel dominated the international bestseller lists and became a set text for literature courses around the world. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize it won a cluster of other awards, including the Bestsellers Paperback of the Year Award (1962) and the literary award of the British Book Society.
The screen rights were acquired by the director Robert Mulligan, whose film starring Gregory Peck was a critical and box office success. It won Oscars for Peck as Best Actor and for Horton Foote for his screenplay. Having given just three interviews in the wake of publication, in which she described her novel as “a love story pure and simple”, Harper Lee returned to Monroeville to write her second novel. No manuscript ever arrived at her publishers and the relationship between the two parties gently and amicably eroded over the next three decades. As To Kill a Mockingbird took on a life of its own, with multiple annual reprints in most countries, its author refused all requests for interviews and faded from view.
Harper Lee made one additional contribution to literature, however. In 1959, after she had completed but not yet published To Kill a Mockingbird, she accompanied her childhood friend Truman Capote to Holcombe, Kansas, where he was to interview people about the murder of a farmer and his family for an article he intended to write. Capote asked her along, reasoning that for all her time in New York, she still had a country aura about her, to which Kansas farmers were more likely to respond than to his own urban sophistication.
Harper Lee conducted and wrote up many of the interviews that were to be expanded beyond the intended article into Capote’s masterly non-fiction novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he dedicated to Lee “with love and gratitude”. A well-circulated literary myth – untrue – was that Capote was the author of To Kill a Mockingbird and had given the manuscript to Harper Lee out of friendship.
In spite of numerous entreaties, she made few public pronouncements after the mid-1960s. During these decades she divided her time between Monroeville, where she stayed with her sister Alice, who worked for their father’s law firm, and New York. She avoided Monroeville in the summer, when the success of To Kill a
Mockingbird would attract coach-loads of tourists wishing to view the courthouse popularised by the novel and film. The town itself balanced civic pride – the symbol on the Chamber of Commerce was a mockingbird – with respect for its most famous citizen’s desire for privacy.
A rare return to the media spotlight came in 2006 when she wrote a letter for Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, O, in which she despaired of modern mores: “In an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.”
In 2013 she sued an agent who, she claimed, duped her into signing over the copyright on her Pulitzer Prizewinning novel (the case was settled out of court). Far more welcome attention arose from her attendance at luncheons held at the University of Alabama for finalists of an annual student essay contest on the subject of
To Kill a Mockingbird. She delighted in how “they always see new things in it”.
By the mid-1960s she lived alone, indulging her interests in 19th-century literature, 18th-century music, observing politicians and travel.
Harper Lee was portrayed by Catherine Keener in Capote (2005) and by Sandra Bullock in Infamous (2006).
In 2007 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her “outstanding contribution to America’s literary tradition”.
She never married. Harper Lee, born April 28 1926, died February 19 2016