Literary giant ‘never expected’ the impact of her debut work
Author shunned spotlight sparked by ‘Mockingbird’
Harper Lee, whose first novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” about racial injustice in a small Alabama town, sold more than 40 million copies and became one of the most beloved and most taught works of fiction ever written by an American, died on Friday in Monroeville, Ala., where she lived. She was 89.
Hank Conner, a nephew of Lee’s, said she died in her sleep at the Meadows, an assisted-living facility.
The instant success of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the next year, turned Lee into a lit- erary celebrity, a role she found oppressive and never learned to accept.
“I never expected any sort of success with ‘Mockingbird,’ ” Lee told a radio interviewer in 1964. “I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but, at the same time I sort of hoped someone would like it well enough to give me encouragement.”
The enormous success of the film version of the novel, released in 1962 with Gregory Peck in the starring role of Atticus Finch, a small-town Southern lawyer who defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, only added to Lee’s fame and fanned expectations for her next novel.
Sophomore effort
But for more than half a century, a second novel f ailed to turn up, and Lee gained a reputation as a literary Garbo, a recluse whose public appearances to accept an award or an honorary degree counted as important news simply because of their rarity. On such occasions she did not speak, other than to say a brief thank you.
Then, in February 2015, long after the reading public had given up on seeing anything more from Lee, her publisher, Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, dropped a bombshell. It announced plans to publish a manuscript — long thought to be lost and now resurfacing in mysterious circumstances — that Lee had submitted to her editors in 1957 under the title “Go Set a Watchman.”
It told the story of Atticus and his daughter, Jean Louise Finch, known as Scout, 20 years later, when Scout was a young woman living in New York. It included several scenes in which Atticus expresses conservative views on race relations seemingly at odds with his liberal stance in the earlier novel.
The book was published in July with an initial printing of 2 million and, with enormous advance sales, immediately leaped to the top of the fiction best-seller lists, despite tepid reviews.
Camaraderie with Capote
Nelle Harper Lee was born in the poky little town of Monroeville, in southern Alabama, the youngest of four children. “Nelle” was a backward spelling of her maternal grandmother’s first name, and Lee dropped it when “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published, out of fear that readers would pronounce it Nellie, which she hated.
Her father, Asa Coleman Lee, was a prominent lawyer and the model for Atticus Finch, who shared his stilted diction and lofty sense of civic duty. Her mother, Frances Finch Lee, also known as Miss Fanny, was overweight and emotionally fragile. Truman Capote, a friend of Lee’s from childhood, later said that Nelle’s mother had tried to drown her in the bathtub on two occasions, an assertion that Lee indignantly denied.
Lee was a tough little tomboy who en- joyed beating up the local boys, climbing trees and rolling in the dirt. One boy on the receiving end of Nelle’s thrashings was Truman Persons (later Capote), who spent several summers next door with relatives.
The two became fast friends, acting out adventures from “The Rover Boys” and, after Nelle’s father gave the two children an old Underwood typewriter, making up their own stories to dictate to each other.
Capote later wrote Nelle into his first book, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” where she appears as the tomboy Idabel Tompkins. She made a repeat appearance as Ann Finchburg, nicknamed Jumbo, in his story “The Thanksgiving Visitor.” Lee returned the favor, casting Capote in the role of the little blond tale-spinner Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Meeting the writing bug
Lee attended Huntingdon College, a local Methodist school for women. After a year, Lee transferred to the University of Alabama to study law, primarily to please her father. After her senior year, she spent a summer at Oxford University as part of a student exchange program. On her return from England, she decided to go to New York and become a writer.
Lee arrived in Manhattan in 1949. After working briefly at a bookstore, she found work as a reservations agent. At night she wrote on a desk made from a door. The local colony of displaced Southerners regarded her askance. “We didn’t think she was up to much,” recalled Louise Sims, the wife of the saxophonist Zoot Sims. “She said she was writing a book, and that was that.”
By the late 1970s, “To Kill a Mockingbird” had sold nearly 10 million copies, and in 1988 the National Council of Teachers of English reported that it was being taught in 74 percent of the nation’s secondary schools. A decade later, Library Journal declared it the best novel of the 20th century.
In one of her last interviews, with a Chicago radio show in 1964, Lee talked in some detail about her literary ambition: to describe, in a series of novels, the world she grew up in and now saw disappearing.
“This is small-town middle-class Southern life as opposed to the Gothic, as opposed to ‘ Tobacco Road,’ as opposed to plantation life,” she said. “I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.
“In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” Lee added.