Harper Lee

On the overwhelm of success and the controversial second novel

Harper Lee , 1960

Welcome to A Narrative of their Own, where I discuss the work of 20th century women writers and their relevance to contemporary culture.

April 18th, 1926 was the birth date of writer Harper Lee, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning bestselling novel To Kill a Mockingbird, a staple on many English curriculums over the decades.

Born on April 18th 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, Nelle Harper Lee was the youngest of four children and was said to grow up as what was known then as a ‘tomboy’ in her small town.  Lee’s father, like Atticus Finch in the novel that would make her name, worked as a lawyer as well as owning part of the local newspaper, and Lee herself initially began studying the law before dropping out to write.  Her mother, however, suffered from mental illness for most of her life and it is now thought that she likely suffered from bipolar disorder, leading her to rarely leave their home.

It was whilst attending Monroe County High School that Lee developed an interest in English literature, and following graduation in 1944, she attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery. An all-female college, Lee was said to focus on her studies and her own writing, reportedly disinterested in fashion, makeup, or dating.  She became a member of the Literary Honour Society and the Glee Club, later transferring to the University of Alabama, where she was known as a loner and individualist, although she did join a sorority for a short while.  

Lee continued to write, contributing pieces to the college newspaper as well as their humour magazine, Rammer Jammer, of which she later became editor.  Lee had to stop editing the magazine, however, when she was accepted into the university’s law school whilst still an undergraduate.  Following her first year of studying law, however, she confessed to her family that she wished to pursue writing, not the law, and accepted a place as an exchange student at Oxford University in the UK.

Although she returned to her law studies following her summer at Oxford, Lee dropped out after the first semester, moving north to focus on her writing.

Arriving in New York City in 1949 aged twenty-three, Harper began working as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines and the British Overseas Air Corp (BOAC).  During this time, she befriended composer and lyricist Michael Martin Brown and his wife, Joy, who in 1956 gave her the break she needed, offering to support her for a year to write full time.  They also assisted in her search for an agent to sell her work.  She began working on a manuscript about a small Alabama town.  This manuscript became the widely successful To Kill a Mockingbird.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Published in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird is a bildungsroman, coming-of-age story of Scout and Jem Finch and their family living in small-town Alabama.  The children watch in awe as their white lawyer father Atticus takes the case of Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely-accused of rape.  Tom is found guilty by an all-white jury, and Scout and Jem, who are mocked by their classmates because of their father’s moral duty to Robinson, experience first-hand the racism and unjust society in which they live.¹

The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think. Harper Lee

In 2015, a follow-up to Lee’s first novel was published, Go Set a Watchman, which tells the later story of the finch family.  Controversy surrounded the publication of this second book, with accusations that a then eighty-nine year old Lee was pressured into publication of the manuscript.  Prior to 2015, Lee had only ever published one novel, which had become an instant success and became an iconic 1962 movie with Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch.  Lee had reportedly stated that she felt such a pressure to live up to her first book that she never published another novel.  

People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.

Harper Lee

In February 2015, however, a statement was issued by Lee’s publisher announcing that a manuscript had been ‘discovered’ attached to a draft of Mockingbird.  It was claimed that Watchman was that novel.  The controversy was partly based on Lee’s denouncement to publish another novel, leading many critics to feel that it was decidedly shady that she would have agreed to suddenly publish this follow-up. 

Further added to this was Lee’s health at the time of publication: she had suffered a stroke in 2007, and was reportedly suffering from dementia.  This led to a belief that she may have been incapable of giving informed consent to the release of the manuscript, leading to an investigation of elder-abuse by the state of Alabama, though no evidence of coercion was found.

Other critics claimed that they felt the timing of the book during the #BlackLivesMatter era was suspect, and felt that it was a manuscript not in fact written by Lee’s own hand, but by other writers attempting to cash in on her success.  

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

Further controversy occurred when an eager reading public, many remembering Mockingbird as a civil rights classic, with the indomitable Atticus Finch fighting the corner of the Black Tom Robinson falsely accused of rape, discover in Watchman that Atticus Finch is a vocal supporter of racial segregation. 

The book follows Scout Finch (now going by her given name of Jean Louise) discovering, in the 1950s, this truth about her father.  The book is set in the wake of the Brown v Board of Education ruling that public schools were unconstitutional.  Jean Louise, now situated in New York, has assumed that her family back in Alabama are as anti-segregation as she is.  However, she discovers that both her hero-worshipped father and her lover, Henry Clinton, are against the Supreme Court ruling and the NAACP.  

Critics have suggested that the book is about realising your childhood heroes are less than perfect, and represents a particular moment in US history.  But lovers of the original book (or film, which focuses very much on the trial of Tom Robinson), might find difficulty in discovering this new side to Atticus.  

Whenever Harper Lee is mentioned, talk inevitably turns to her friendship with writer Truman Capote.  Capote was one of Lee’s closest childhood friends, and it was said that the character of Dill in Mockingbird was based on him.  As a tough young girl, Lee was said to step in as a ‘protector’ to the less tough Capote, who was often taunted for being too sensitive and for wearing fancy clothes.  Both Lee and Capote, though very different in personality, likely bonded over their difficult home lives.  Truman had been largely abandoned by his own parents and sent to live with his mother’s relatives in town.  

Truman Capote and Harper Lee, 1966, Holcomb, Kansas

Whilst living in New York City in the 1950s, Lee once again met up with Capote, who was already rising in literary circles.  Lee assisted him on an article he was commissioned to write for The New Yorker, based on the impact of the murders of four family members on a small Kansas farming community.  Lee and Capote travelled to Kansas, interviewing the locals about the murdered family, as well as the investigators working on the murders.  Lee became Capote’s research assistant at this time, and worked hard to win over some of the locals.  Being a little more easygoing and unpretentious than the flamboyant Capote, she often had more success at getting them to open up to interviews.  

Whilst the pair of writers were in Kansas, the suspected murderers were apprehended in Las Vegas and brought back for questioning, where Lee and Capote had a chance to interview them in January 1960 before returning to New York.  

Lee continued to work on her novel and Capote on his article on the murders, eventually turning this into the bestselling nonfiction narrative book In Cold Blood.  Both writers returned to Kansas for the trial of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, where Lee handed over her copious notes on the crime and community.  She also continued to work with Capote on In Cold Blood, and was invited to witness the convicted murderers’ execution in 1965, which she declined. 

However, once the book was published in 1966, a distance developed between Lee and Capote.  Capote had decided to dedicate his book to Lee and his lover, Jack Dunphy, however he did not acknowledge her contributions to the text.  She understandably felt betrayed by this, however, she reportedly remained friends with Capote for the rest of his life.

Harper Lee, who was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by President George W Bush in 2007, died on 19th February 2016 at the age of eighty-nine.  Her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, had sold more than forty million copies at her death and has arguably become a defining text of twentieth-century racial tension in the American south.  She was said to have taken the politics of the civil rights era and made them human.  

Harper Lee receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2007

She was a writer who valued her privacy, and I can’t help but wonder what she would have made of the controversy the publication of her second novel has provoked. 

When occasionally pushed to comment on her choice to publish just one book, she maintained that she had found the publicity surrounding her first novel to be overwhelming, and besides, she had said all she had to say in that single work.

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1. This 1964 recording of Harper Lee speaking about To Kill a Mockingbird is the only known recording of her speaking about her novel.