Author’s Note

Truman Capote and (Nelle) Harper Lee went on to become two of the most heralded American writers of the twentieth century. Truman’s acclaimed works include Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Grass Harp, A Christmas Memory, and In Cold Blood—a crime story that reunited him with Nelle in 1959. Until recently, Nelle had published only one book in her lifetime, but To Kill a Mockingbird has become an enduring classic that won a Pulitzer Prize and sold more than forty million copies worldwide.

 

 

To Kill a Mockingbird and many of Truman’s short stories were inspired by their years growing up in the tiny town of Monroeville, Alabama. As Truman’s aunt, Mary Ida, once said about him, “He took nuggets of truth, gave them a new twist, and made them bigger than life.” Likewise, many of the events told in this book actually happened, but I’ve rearranged them into a single story and added more than a few fibs for spice, hopefully making for a flavorful bowl of southern homestyle yarns. One rule of thumb holds true: the more outrageous and unbelievable a scene, the closer it is to real life.

After Truman’s big farewell Halloween extravaganza in 1933, he moved to New York to live with his mother, Lillie Mae, and her second husband, Joseph Capote, a Cuban business man, who adopted Truman as his own. Unfortunately, Truman never got along with either of them and ended up being sent to a series of boarding schools (including a disastrous stint at a military academy). In 1939, they moved briefly to Connecticut, where an English teacher saw talent in Truman’s writing and encouraged him to contribute short stories and poetry to the school’s literary journal and campus paper.

Throughout his years away, Truman sought refuge in the past, returning every summer to Monroeville, where he resumed having adventures with Nelle and Big Boy. Later, however, as money problems arose from his stepfather’s embezzling schemes (to pay for Lillie Mae’s extravagant spending), these visits became fewer and far between.

Nelle stayed in Monroeville, becoming an independent and strong-willed young woman. In high school, mentored by an English teacher, she discovered her love of British literature and decided she wanted to become the Jane Austen of southern Alabama. Meanwhile, Truman wrote and wrote, his stories about life in Monroeville providing his only escape from exile. He decided not to go to college, and after a short stint working for The New Yorker magazine, Truman started publishing short stories in literary journals, where he began to be recognized for his unusually refined style of writing.

After high school, Nelle went on to study law, but dropped out to pursue writing after Truman published his first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948. Truman based the novel’s tomboy character, Idabel, on Nelle.

 

 

The following year, Nelle moved to New York to pursue her dream and supported herself as an airline reservations agent. Truman was her only friend in the big city. However, he introduced her to a couple, the Browns, who in 1956 offered to support Nelle for an entire year so she could finally write her first book. That novel became To Kill a Mockingbird. Nelle based the character of Dill on Truman.

In 1959, before her novel was published, Nelle accompanied Truman to Kansas, where he began working on a new kind of book, a “nonfiction novel” called In Cold Blood. With Nelle at his side, it was just like the old days, the two of them teaming up to solve a small-town crime­—in this case, murder. “The crime intrigued him, and I’m intrigued with crime—and, boy, I wanted to go. It was deep calling to deep,” Nelle remembered.

When Nelle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, Truman, frustrated by the lengthy and traumatic nature of his project, grew jealous of her success. Despite her newfound acclaim and riches, Nelle returned to Kansas with Truman three years later for the culmination of his research—the murder trials that would close the case—and his story. She was shocked, though, when his book finally came out in 1966, to see that Truman had downplayed her contribution, acknowledging her substantial assistance as “secretarial help.” Their friendship suffered, despite both books becoming defining novels of the 1960s, huge international bestsellers, and acclaimed movies. Truman’s book did not win the Pulitzer, as predicted by many.

According to Truman, he never quite recovered from the experience of writing that haunting book, and Nelle, overwhelmed by the media hype and attention over her novel, never wrote another novel. Truman died in 1984 of liver cancer, complicated by years of drinking. Nelle hid from the public eye for most of her post-Mockingbird life, and now resides in an assisted living facility in Monroeville. A previously lost manuscript, Go Set a Watchman, became her second (and last) novel to revisit her childhood with Truman, a fitting end to one of the greatest backstories in American literature.

 

“We had to use our own devices in our play, for our entertainment. We didn’t have much money. Nobody had any money. We didn’t have toys, nothing was done for us, so the result was that we lived in our imagination most of the time. We devised things; we were readers, and we would transfer everything we had seen on the printed page to the backyard in the form of high drama. Did you never play Tarzan when you were a child? Did you never tramp through the jungle or refight the battle of Gettysburg in some form or fashion? We did. Did you never live in a tree house and find the whole world in the branches of a chinaberry tree? We did.”—(Nelle) Harper Lee