South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)

Flynt reveals personal side of Lee through her storytelli­ng

- By Jay Reeves

To the world, Harper Lee was aloof to the point of being unknowable, an obsessivel­y private person who spent most of her life avoiding the public gaze despite writing one of the bestsellin­g books ever, “To Kill a Mockingbir­d.” To Wayne Flynt, the Alabamabor­n author was his friend, Nelle.

Flynt, a longtime Southern historian who became close friends with Nelle Harper Lee late in her life, has written his second book about the author, “Afternoons with Harper Lee,” which was recently released.

Based on Flynt’s notes from dozens of visits with Lee over a decade before her death in 2016, the book is like sitting on a porch and hearing tales of Lee’s childhood and family in rural Alabama, her later life in New York and everything in between.

The public perception of Lee as a hermit is wrong, Flynt, a former history professor at Auburn University, said. No, she didn’t do media interviews, and she guarded her privacy zealously, but she also was warm and kind to friends that included a former first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, Flynt said. And Lee was “deeply religious” in a way many people aren’t, he said.

“It’s an attempt to tell the story of the authentic woman, not the marble lady,” Flynt said.

The book also is a tribute to Flynt’s late wife, Dartie, who died in 2020. Lee, who suffered a stroke in 2007, seemed to identify with the physical travails of Dartie Flynt, who had Parkinson’s disease, Flynt said.

“I think she tolerated me because she loved Dartie,” he said.

Born in 1926 when the South was still racially segregated by law, Lee grew up in the south Alabama town of Monroevill­e, the daughter of a lawyer who served as a model for attorney Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbir­d,” a story of race, injustice and the law during the Jim Crow era. The town itself became Maycomb, the book’s setting.

Preferring football, softball, golf and books to small-town social affairs or college sororities, Lee’s well-known desire for privacy may have come in part from a feeling of being different from others growing up around her in the South, Flynt said.

“I think she occupied a world where she felt she was not like other girls,” he said.

Lee was rarely heard from in public after her partly autobiogra­phical “Mockingbir­d” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was made into a hit movie. She mostly lived in an apartment in Manhattan, where it was easier to blend in than back home, until the stroke left her partially paralyzed.

Flynt and his late wife knew Lee’s two sisters, and they became close to the author after she returned to Alabama for good following the stroke. They visited her at a rehabilita­tion center in Birmingham and then at an assisted living home in Monroevill­e, where she spent years before her death. Lee died just months after the release of her novel “Go Set a Watchman,” which actually was an early version of “Mockingbir­d.”

The book doesn’t get into the most private aspects of Lee’s life; Flynt said they simply didn’t discuss such things. But it does recount her worsening isolation from deafness and blindness toward the end of her life; her love of gambling; the furor over “Watchman;” and her authorship of a still-unpublishe­d manuscript about a bizarre murder case in central Alabama.

“Afternoons with Harper Lee” is a follow-up to Flynt’s “Mockingbir­d Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee.” While the first book was based on letters between the two, the new book is more meandering and conversati­onal than the first in the tradition of Southern storytelli­ng.

“The letters are lifeless compared to the stories,” he said.

 ?? JAY REEVES/AP ?? Historian Wayne Flynt holds a copy of his book “Afternoons with Harper Lee,” about the author of “To Kill a Mockingbir­d” who died in 2016, on Sept. 22 in Alabama.
JAY REEVES/AP Historian Wayne Flynt holds a copy of his book “Afternoons with Harper Lee,” about the author of “To Kill a Mockingbir­d” who died in 2016, on Sept. 22 in Alabama.

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