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‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ Author Harper Lee Dies At 89

‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ Author Harper Lee Dies At 89

By Bill Trott

(Reuters) – Harper Lee, who wrote one of America’s most beloved literary classics, To Kill a Mockingbird, and surprised readers 55 years later with the publication of a second book about the same characters, died at the age of 89 on Friday.

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 as the civil rights movement was heating up and its unflinching examination of racial hatred in the U.S. South made it especially poignant. Its theme could be summed up with the advice that Atticus gave Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

A statement from Tonja Carter, Lee’s attorney in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, said Lee had “passed away early this morning in her sleep” there and that her death was unexpected. She would have a private funeral.

Lee lived an almost reclusive life for decades and it had appeared that her sole literary output would be To Kill a Mockingbird, especially since she acknowledged she could not top the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. That was what made the July 2015 publication of Go Set a Watchman such a surprising and somewhat controversial literary event.

In the first book, Atticus Finch was the adored father of the young narrator Scout and a lawyer who nobly but unsuccessfully defended a black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman. But in Watchman, an older Atticus had racial views that left the grown-up Scout greatly disillusioned.

Lee reportedly had written Go Set a Watchman first but, at the suggestion of a wise editor, set it aside to tell a tale of race in the South from the child’s point of view in the 1930s.

For many years, Lee, a shy woman with an engaging Southern drawl who never married, lived quietly and privately, always turning down interview requests. She alternated between living in a New York apartment and Monroeville, where she shared a home with her older sister, lawyer Alice Lee.

After suffering a stroke and enduring failing vision and hearing, she spent her final years in an assisted living residence in Monroeville.

“When I saw her just six weeks ago, she was full of life, her mind and mischievous wit as sharp as ever,” her agent, Andrew Nurnberg, said in a statement. “She was quoting Thomas More and setting me straight on Tudor history.”

The movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird also became an American classic. It won the Academy Award for best picture in 1963 while Gregory Peck, who played Atticus and would become Lee’s good friend, was named best actor.

SAD DAY IN MONROEVILLE

Spencer Madrie, owner of the Ol’ Curiosities & Book Shoppe dedicated to the work of Lee and other Southern authors, said Monroeville was in a somber mood.

“You wish somebody like that could go on forever and be this lifelong legend,” he said. “You don’t ever consider somebody like that passing, even though her legacy will last for generations after.”

Lee’s state of mind would become an issue last year when plans were announced to publish Go Set a Watchman. Some friends said that after the death of her sister Alice, who handled Harper’s affairs, lawyer Carter had manipulated Lee to approve publication.

Carter had said she came across the Watchman” manuscript while doing legal work for Lee in 2014 and an investigation by Alabama state officials found there was no coercion in getting Lee’s permission to publish.

A family friend, the Reverend Thomas Lane Butts, told an Australian interviewer that Lee had said she did not publish again because she did not want to endure the pressure and publicity of another book and because she had said all that she wanted to say.

Lee essentially quit giving interviews in 1964 and rarely made public appearances. She did regularly attend an annual luncheon at the University of Alabama, however, to meet with the winners of a high school essay contest on the subject of her book.

In November 2007, she went to the White House to accept a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush, who at the time called her book “a gift to the entire world.”

Bush said in a statement on Friday that he and his wife, Laura Bush, a former librarian, mourned Lee. “Harper Lee was ahead of her time and her masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird prodded America to catch up with her,” he said.

News of Lee’s death spread widely on social media and tributes poured in from well-known figures, such as Apple Inc Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, who quoted the author in a tweet by saying, “Rest in peace, Harper Lee. ‘The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.'”

CHANGING RACIAL VIEWS

Nelle Harper Lee was born April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, the youngest of four children of A.C. and Frances Finch Lee and a descendant of Civil War General Robert E. Lee. Like Scout, Lee grew up a tomboy.

Lee had studied law at the University of Alabama but, six months before finishing her studies, she went to New York in the early 1950s to pursue a literary career while working as an airline reservation clerk.

In 1956 friends Michael and Joy Brown gave Lee a special Christmas gift, a year of financial support so she could work full time on To Kill a Mockingbird.

An estimated 30 million copies of the book were sold. It would become required reading in many American schools but the American Library Association said it was frequently challenged by those who did not like its subject matter.

Lee also played a key role in researching another great American book by Truman Capote, her childhood friend and the inspiration for the frail, precocious Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.

In 1959 she accompanied Capote to Holcombe, Kansas, to work on In Cold Blood, the chilling account of the murders of a farming family. Her mannerly, down-home approach undoubtedly smoothed the way for the flamboyant Capote.

There was speculation that Capote helped her write To Kill a Mockingbird but in his 2006 biography, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, Charles J. Shields disputed that. He also said Lee’s contribution to Capote’s “In Cold Blood” was greater than believed.

Lee’s sister said the authors eventually fell out because Capote was jealous of Lee’s Pulitzer, which she won in 1961.

In 2006 Lee wrote a piece for O magazine about developing a childhood love of books, even though they were scarce in Monroeville.

“Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books,” she wrote.

(Reporting and writing by Bill Trott; Additional reporting by Letitia Stein and Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Grant McCool)

Photo: U.S. President George W. Bush (R) before awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to American novelist Harper Lee (L) in the East Room of the White House, in this November 5, 2007, file photo. REUTERS/Larry Downing/Files

Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set A Watchman’ Reveals A Darker Side Of Maycomb

Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set A Watchman’ Reveals A Darker Side Of Maycomb

By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Go Set a Watchman: A Novel by Harper Lee; Harper (278 pages, $27.99)
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It would be a mistake to read Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman as a sequel to her 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird.

Yes, it takes place a generation after the earlier book, involving a visit from Scout Finch — now 26 and using her given name, Jean Louise — to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama, from New York, where she has gone to live. Yes, Maycomb has changed: Scout’s older brother, Jem, we learn in the opening chapter, is dead, victim of a congenitally disordered heart, and her father, Atticus, has not only grown old but also darker and more compromised.

There are references to a trial from the past, during which Atticus defended a black man against charges of raping a white woman: “Consent was easier to prove,” Lee writes, “than under normal conditions — the defendant had only one arm.”

Such a description recalls Tom Robinson, whose trial for a similar offense is at the center of To Kill a Mockingbird. “His left arm was fully twelve inches shorter than his right,” the author explains in that novel, “and hung dead at his side. It ended in a small shriveled hand.”

And yet, those two trials come to very different outcomes; Tom was memorably convicted in To Kill a Mockingbird, even with no evidence against him, whereas in Go Set a Watchman, Atticus “accomplished what was never before or afterwards done in Maycomb County: He won acquittal for a colored boy on a rape charge.”

That’s just one of many points of divergence or overlap between the novels, which are related in a complicated way.

According to numerous accounts, Go Set a Watchman is the earliest version of the manuscript that became To Kill a Mockingbird, acquired by Lippincott in 1957 and subjected, under the guidance of editor Tay Hohoff, to what Smithsonian Magazine once called “a title-on-down revision.” What does this mean for us as readers? That we can’t help but engage with Go Set a Watchman through a filter of comparison.

Lee introduces us to Maycomb, its history and inconsistencies, as if we have never been here before. We learn, in a passage virtually identical to one in To Kill a Mockingbird, of the town’s origin as county seat, after a tavern keeper named Sinkfield “made the surveyors drunk one evening, induced them to bring forward their maps and charts, lop off a little here, add a bit there, and adjust the center of the county to meet his requirements.”

We encounter Atticus’ even-handedness: his insistence on “always (trying) to put himself in his client’s shoes.” In Go Set a Watchman, however, this is not a marker of his moral dependability but rather of his moral corruption.

Corruption? Yes — for this is not the Atticus of To Kill a Mockingbird. In Go Set a Watchman, he has turned a treacherous corner, aligning with the citizen’s council and the Ku Klux Klan.

“Now think about this,” he tells his daughter. “What would happen if all the Negroes in the South were suddenly given full civil rights? I’ll tell you, there’d be another Reconstruction. Would you want your state governments run by people who don’t know how to run ’em? … We’re outnumbered, you know.”

This is the conflict of the novel, Jean Louise’s struggle to come to some accommodation with a father who is not who she believed he was.

Throughout the first part of the book, Lee builds the tension, drawing us in slowly, revealing the Maycomb her protagonist thought she knew. We visit Finch’s Landing, experience flashbacks to her childhood with Jem and Dill (although not Boo Radley) and meet her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Henry Clinton.

The pace can be, at times, meandering, but the focus appears to sharpen with her discovery, among her father’s reading materials, of a racist tract called “The Black Plague.” “The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her,” Lee writes, “the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, ‘He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentlemen,’ had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.”

That’s a vivid setup, and it indicates the promise Hohoff recognized in this draft nearly 60 years ago. Promise, however, remains the operative word, for Go Set a Watchman is an apprentice effort, and it falls apart in the second half.

Despite its potential for drama, Lee develops her story through long dialogue sequences that read less like conversation than competing arguments. There is little sense of urgency, and key aspects of the narrative — Jean Louise’s naiveté, for one thing, her inability to see Maycomb for what it is — are left largely unresolved.

If I’m hesitant to level such a criticism, it’s because, although Go Set a Watchman comes marketed as an autonomous novel, it is most interesting as a literary artifact.

How did Lee take the frame of this fiction and collapse it to create To Kill a Mockingbird, finding a narrative fluency only hinted at within this draft? How did she refine her language, her scene construction, discover a way to enlarge what are here little more than political and social commonplaces, to expose a universal human core?

Regardless of the answers, Go Set a Watchman shows where she began. It is a starker book than To Kill a Mockingbird, more reactive to its moment; a common theme involves what its characters regard as the overreach of the U.S. Supreme Court, which at the time Lee was writing had recently ruled on school desegregation in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka.

Most interesting, however, is the glimpse it offers of Jean Louise as an adult, her desire to stake out a territory of her own.

It is difficult, knowing the history of both this novel and its author, not to read those longings as belonging to Lee herself, the reasons for her own long New York exile, her silence in the wake of To Kill a Mockingbird. That too raises questions we can never answer about why Go Set a Watchman is being published now.

Certainly, it changes — as it must — our sense of Atticus, although that is complicated by this being not a follow-up but instead an early version of the book. At what point did Lee soften her portrayal? And what does it mean to read this version of him now?

In the end, it suggests a vivid set of contradictions, as much between the author and the character as between the character and himself.

“Hell is eternal apartness,” Lee writes. “What had she done that she must spend the rest of her years reaching out with yearning for them, making secret trips to long ago, making no journey to the present? I am their blood and bones, I have dug in this ground, this is my home. But I am not their blood, the ground doesn’t care who digs it, I am a stranger at a cocktail party.”

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The Troubling Legacy Of Atticus Finch

The Troubling Legacy Of Atticus Finch

So the beloved Atticus Finch was actually a racist? The saintly small-town attorney of To Kill a Mockingbird was really a member of a local White Citizens’ Council, that network of retrograde organizations dedicated to white supremacy?

The publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman has produced waves of anguish and despair among her fans, who fell in love with her coming-of-age tale featuring a courageous lawyer who bucked the townsfolk and endured threats to represent a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Generations have adored Atticus.

That man is hardly present in Watchman, which is apparently an early draft of the novel that eventually became Mockingbird. The two books are quite different, with a stunningly bigoted Atticus as the biggest surprise.

So what are we to make of Atticus now?

Pardon me for being literal here, but it’s probably helpful to remember that Atticus is a fictional character, a creation of Lee’s fertile imagination. Both versions of Atticus are.

As a native of Lee’s hometown, Monroeville, Alabama, I grew up immersed in tales of the people, places, and events that may have inspired her. Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was, indeed, a local attorney. But there is no record of his taking on a black defendant in a case that incited the anger of local white residents, as did the charge of rape leveled against Tom Robinson, the black defendant in Mockingbird. (Amasa Lee’s politics are lost in the footnotes of history, though there is little reason to believe he stood apart from his time and place.)

Instead, Mockingbird and Watchman are both explorations of Harper Lee’s views of the racism that enshrouded — indeed, straitjacketed — the South. Lee — “Miss Nelle,” to locals — was not a creature of her time and place.

Tomboyish as a child, she was known as brilliant, bookish, acerbic, and headstrong. And she clearly saw something wrong with the social structure dictated by Jim Crow. (I’ve had the pleasure of a few conversations with her, and it’s clear she’d never have fit in with the expectations for patrician white women of her day.) She explored, protested and illuminated that social structure in her fiction.

The just-published Go Set a Watchman takes place after Jean Louise Finch, a character who bears some resemblance to the author, is a young adult living in New York City. During a summer visit to her native Maycomb, she learns that her father, whom she believed a paragon of integrity, holds abhorrent views on race. So does her suitor, her father’s law partner.

A bit disjointed and lacking the lyricism of Lee’s later effort, the book deals with Finch’s efforts to come to terms with their bigotry. It rarely soars, but it does have its moments of insight and wisdom.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by contrast, is set in Finch’s childhood and makes her its masterful narrator. The novel is well written, sagacious and, with a noble Atticus, redemptive.

But it has drawn its critics over the years — reviewers who note the limitations of even that version of Atticus Finch. He was hardly a revolutionary who wanted to tear down Jim Crow, they say.

That’s true. If you read Mockingbird closely, you’ll see Atticus’ paternalism. He represented a patrician class that believed in a sense of fair play, especially before the bar of justice. But he was hardly advocating full equality for his black hirelings and acquaintances.

Still, I admire that Atticus. I accept him, despite his flaws, as an example of quiet heroism. He may not have broken ranks with Jim Crow, but his simple decency stood apart.

Young readers — and older readers, too, I believe — will continue to be drawn to the example of a fictional hero willing to sacrifice popularity in pursuit of a righteous cause. That’s a harder thing than most of us care to admit. So I believe the Atticus of Mockingbird will always endure, even if he’s temporarily overshadowed by a less virtuous one.

(Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Image: Screengrab from To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) via Wikicommons

Top Reads For News Junkies: ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’

Top Reads For News Junkies: ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’

Everyone got a pleasant jolt this week with the sudden announcement that Harper Lee, the most celebrated one-hit wonder in the annals of American literature, was to publish a sequel to her immortal Pulitzer Prize-winner (and staple of middle-school classrooms), To Kill A Mockingbird. Take some time between now and the July release of Go Set A Watchmen to reacquaint yourself with Atticus, Scout, Jem, and the “tired old town” of Maycomb, Alabama.

You can purchase the book here.