Harper Lee

WHEN NELLE WAS asked what advice she would give a young writer just starting out, she said:

Well, the first advice I would give is this: hope for the best and expect nothing. Then you won’t be disappointed. You must come to terms with yourself about writing. You must not write “for” something; you must not write with definite hopes of reward. People who write for reward by way of recognition or monetary gain don’t know what they’re doing. They’re in the category of those who write; they are not writers.

But by 1964, Nelle had grown weary of answering the same questions over and over. She was also frustrated by journalists getting the facts wrong. It’s unclear if there was a single, defining incident or just enough is enough, but she called it quits on all formal interviews by 1964. In the following passage, she talks about her meteoric rise to fame and how it all became much too much:

It was like being hit over the head and knocked cold. You see, I never expected any sort of success with “Mockingbird.” I didn’t expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.

She entered a quiet period after 1964, and little was reported about her in the media. She spoke to Time magazine about Truman’s book In Cold Blood, but she would no longer discuss To Kill a Mockingbird. When she was in Monroeville, she used to call up her good friend Louise Jones, the wife of George Thomas Jones, to play golf with her.

George Thomas Jones said, “Nelle would call Louise to play golf, and finally my wife said, ‘Nelle, I like playing golf with you, and I appreciate that you ask me . . . but why do you always ask me and nobody else?’ Nelle said, ‘Because you never ask me about the book. Or when I’m going to write another one.’ Nelle got a bellyful of that stuff,” Jones continued. “Once, she played in a tournament with my wife and a bunch of silly women on the other fairway were waving and calling to her, ‘Hey Scout! Hey Scout!’ ”

“Nelle is in the hospital, the result of a serious kitchen accident. She burned herself very badly, especially her right hand. It seems some sort of pan caught fire and exploded—all of that at her home in Alabama.” Even the act of holding a pen or typing was impossible for a long while. Her only output during this time was an essay published in McCall’s magazine called “When Children Discover America,” encouraging young people to explore their country.

If more young people traveled with their eyes and minds open and saw this country, they would have a deeper feeling about it. Adventuring across the country is out of style. Whatever happened to working after school in a grocery store to get enough money to hitchhike to California during your vacation? My youngest nephew may be one of the last to do that, and he did when he was fifteen. His parents were terrified, but he got himself to the World’s Fair. His mother had thoughtfully sewn a bus ticket into the cuff of his trousers, but he swore he would never use it. He ended up in Chicago and lived on milk and rolls for three days because he didn’t have any money.

When he finally got home, he had lost thirty pounds; but he was the happiest boy I had ever seen in my life. He had discovered something of America for himself. It will mean something to him for the rest of his life.

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson invited Nelle to the White House to have dinner. The occasion was meant to celebrate both the book and the film, and also how the book had come to act as a symbol of the civil rights movement. Nelle had written To Kill a Mockingbird as the early civil rights movement was gaining momentum in the late 1950s. Her book also inspired generations of students to go into law because of Atticus Finch.

Tay Hohoff was very anxious to have Nelle’s second novel by 1968 in time for the 150th anniversary of J. B. Lippincott Publishers. But it wasn’t ready. It is not clear how much Tay saw of the new book, but she and Nelle may have decided together that it was not ready for publication, according to Wayne Greenhaw. That same year, Nelle’s adored book agent, Maurice Crain, was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 1970, a loss that surely devastated Nelle. Maurice had been the first one to read her early stories and encouraged her to write the novel. Besides being her agents, he and his wife, Annie Laurie Williams, along with Tay, had become Nelle’s dearest friends. Four years after the death of Crain, Tay died. Nelle had adored her editor and was deeply hurt by this loss, too. Although Tay had retired, it is likely that Nelle still shared work with her. Finally, Annie Laurie Williams passed away in 1977 after years of health problems, so three of Nelle’s major support beams in both her personal and writing life had vanished. Maybe it was hard for her to write another book without them to give her suggestions and feedback.

In 1983, Nelle agreed to give a talk about Albert James Pickett, who wrote Pickett’s History of Alabama, which had been published in 1851. Her sister Louise had arranged the event, and Nelle was willing to do it as a favor to her. Pickett’s History was one of her favorite books. Her talk, called “Romance and High Adventure,” was part of the Alabama History and Heritage Festival. Mercer University Press later published it in the anthology Clearings in the Thicket. Nelle focused on her great love of history, and she included passages on the Creek Indians, slavery, and Pickett’s brilliance as an author. It went very well, but Nelle was terrified before taking the stage. She admitted to a friend right before the talk, “It’s like an owl at noon. You’ll never see me do something like this again.” And she didn’t.

It is not known how much Nelle saw Truman after 1966, when In Cold Blood was published with phenomenal success. Once again, he became the toast of New York City, but, like Nelle, he never published another book. He spent his remaining years struggling to finish books and becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol, which ultimately led to his death in 1984. In his book Lost Friendships, Donald Windham wrote that Nelle and Truman had not been in touch for fifteen years prior to his death. But biographer Gerald Clarke wrote: “As far as I know, she and Truman never had a falling out, at least not one so serious that they stopped talking. I do know that he called her on my behalf in the mid-seventies and persuaded her to talk to me. She spoke very fondly of him then—this was about eight years before his death—and I have no reason to think she changed her mind after that. He never mentioned a falling out to me, and I’m certain if there had been one, he would have.”

Because Nelle never published another book, some time in the 1970s literary conspiracy theorists began to spread a rumor that Truman had actually ghostwritten To Kill a Mockingbird. It was a salacious piece of gossip that he did not deny, which fueled it further. And it was a rumor that Nelle refused to dignify with a response. One can only imagine the betrayal she must have felt.

Historian Dr. Wayne Flynt believes Truman was jealous of Nelle. “He never won a National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize. Toward the end of his drug-induced haze, he began to drop hints that he was the author.” A letter dated July 9, 1959, from Truman to his aunt Mary Ida Carter praising Nelle and her novel finally put the rumor to rest when Mary Ida Carter’s son, Big Boy, donated the letter to the Monroe County Heritage Museum in 2006.

A CBS newscaster once waited for hours outside the United Methodist Church in Monroeville with a crew, hoping to interview Nelle, who was inside. But she stayed in the church with other members until he gave up and went away. And the late George Plimpton once tried to find her in Monroeville to interview her for a book he was doing about Truman, but she went golfing and avoided all contact with him. Nelle wrote to Plimpton, explaining, “I don’t like interviews. I just don’t do them.”

A local Monroeville doctor, Dr. David Stallworth, said: “I’m always a bit bothered when people describe [Nelle] as reclusive. She is private. She guards her privacy. And there’s so much more to her than To Kill a Mockingbird. My personal opinion is that she had a choice early on. She could become Nelle Harper Lee, or Harper Lee who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, and become the footnote to the novel. No one likes to be marginalized.”

Nelle enjoys talking with the young students she meets every spring in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for an essay contest. In 2001, with the help of the University of Alabama and the Alabama Academy of Honor, Lee started an annual contest for Alabama high school students to write about how the South has and has not changed since the time of To Kill a Mockingbird. A ceremony is held every year in Tuscaloosa, and she has never missed one. She speaks with the winners, but avoids journalists—except for one interview in 2006 with The New York Times, in which she agreed to discuss only the students and their essays. She told the reporter, “They always see new things in [the book]. . . . And the way they relate it to their lives now is really quite incredible.”

In 2006, the predominantly white Mountain Brook High School and the all-black Fairfield Preparatory High School in Birmingham joined forces to produce a play of To Kill a Mockingbird. The project began with the vision of Pat Yates, the Mountain Brook drama teacher, who designed the production. Fairfield Preparatory didn’t have a drama program, much less a stage, but when Yates met the Fairfield choral director, Patsy Howze, the two decided to bring these two divergent student bodies together. Filmmaker Sandy Jaffe filmed the rehearsals and interviewed students. She made the play the center of her 2009 documentary Our Mockingbird. Student Roman Gladney, who played Tom Robinson, was thrilled to be a part of it, and was even more excited that Nelle came to see the play. “Oh my God, it was like I was meeting the president of the United States,” said Gladney. Nelle hugged him and gave him an autograph. Gladney asked Nelle about the Tom Robinson character, and she replied that he was “a man with pride.”

Another student in Jaffe’s documentary responded to the treatment of race in To Kill a Mockingbird. Jaffe said, “The idea of being unjustly accused because of one’s race still resonates with young people today. An Arab student from a Boston high school talks about how he identifies with Tom Robinson—describing the terrorist attacks of 2001 when he was unjustly accused of being a terrorist just because his family was from Saudi Arabia.”

The Big Read was developed by the National Endowment for the Arts to “revitalize” the idea of reading in America, bringing communities together to read and discuss a single book. To Kill a Mockingbird has been one of the most frequently selected “Big Reads” in cities and towns across America. Author Nina Revoyr works with incarcerated men in Los Angeles and helped develop the curriculum for the “Big Read in Corrections” pilot program. In an interview, she noted how all of the prisoners in their twenties identified most strongly with the character of Boo Radley.

“We had a long discussion about whether or not he was really ‘crazy,’ ” Revoyr said. “Their observation was that his situation was the equivalent of being put in isolation. They also noted his attempts to reach out, and drew some parallels. They also noted how Boo’s friends had different outcomes—the kid who went to vocational school and ended up as an engineer.” This led to discussions of why inmates needed something productive to do while incarcerated.

At the Lifetime Achievement Awards at the Birmingham Pledge Foundation in 2006, Nelle spoke to Nancy Womble, the daughter of one of her childhood friends, Margaret McNeil. Womble sent an e-mail in 2008 describing this chance meeting:

After reading the unauthorized biography by Charles Shields, I realized that my Aunt Ruth (Mrs. Leighton McNeil) taught Nelle Lee in first grade. This was mentioned on page 32 of this book. I then began to call the only living relative to ask about mother and her relationship with Ms. Lee.

My aunt and uncle in Mobile, Alabama—Charles and Evelyn McNeil told me that my mother and Nelle Lee were childhood friends. Mother would play at Nelle’s house and Nelle would play at my mother’s house. This was something I never heard about since my mom died one month after my 9th birthday, in 1969.

I arrived early that evening—not dreaming that I would see Ms. Lee before the presentation. Not only did I see her, but without hesitation, I approached her and asked her directly if she indeed knew my mother.

Nancy: “My mother was from Frisco City,” I blurted out, “but she died when I was 9 years old.”

Ms. Lee: “Who was your mother?”

Nancy: “Margaret McNeil.”

Ms. Lee: “Who?”

Nancy: “Margaret McNeil.”

Ms. Lee, after hearing the name clearly, opened her arms to me and tilted her head in such a gentle and loving way.

Ms. Lee: “Of course I knew your mother. Of course she was my friend. She was a lovely person.”

It was a wonderful moment of confirmation and grace for me.

In a 2007 interview, Angela Roberts, the former librarian at Alabama Southern College in Monroeville, said, “I met Nelle when I started working here, and she’d come by to pick up the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle for Miss Alice. She loves talking to children and young people—she will talk and listen to them for hours, but she has no patience with adults or journalists who only want to ask her nosy questions or pry into her private life. She loves fruitcake, and she and Alice always give away fruitcakes in December.” Roberts also described how Nelle used to sign three hundred copies of her book every year to donate to the students at Alabama Southern College. Then a colleague of Roberts’s began selling signed copies on eBay for six hundred dollars each. Enraged, Nelle quit signing her books for Alabama Southern and will no longer sign books, except in special circumstances.

George Thomas Jones, a native Monroevillian historian and columnist for the Monroe Journal, described one of those special signing circumstances. A family with a teenage son in a coma had a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. Jones said they had approached him about asking Nelle to sign the first edition, so they could sell it to pay for their son’s hospital bills. Jones asked nine of Nelle’s friends in Monroeville if they would ask Nelle to sign the book, but all nine people said no. They did not feel comfortable asking her. George didn’t approach her himself, because he hadn’t been on speaking terms with Nelle and Alice ever since he had published an article Alice had asked him not to run in the Monroe Journal. Finally, he wrote to Nelle, “Dear Nelle, I don’t give a hoot if you sign the book or not. It’s not for me.” He explained that it was for the family, and left the note and book at Alice’s office. A few hours later, the phone rang. Nelle said, “George, I’ll sign the book.”

In 2007, Nelle was inducted in the Alabama Academy of Honor and spoke only these words at the ceremony: “It’s better to be silent than to be a fool.” That same year, in November, the White House awarded Nelle America’s highest civilian honor by giving her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to the world of literature. She attended the ceremony with Veronique Peck, Gregory’s wife, but she did not speak. A White House statement said: “At a critical moment in our history, her beautiful book, To Kill a Mockingbird, helped focus the nation on the turbulent struggle for equality.”

The redbrick Colonial home where Nelle and Alice currently live is on the same block where Nelle attended high school. The school is now Monroeville Junior High, where ironically a 2008 discrimination lawsuit was filed by the ACLU on behalf of parents of black students who claimed their children were the target of racial slurs and were kept out of AP classes. The lawsuit is ongoing.

When Nelle was a child, church was the town’s principal recreation—church picnics, church socials, and football games between the Baptists and Methodists. Even today, seventy-five churches dot Monroe County alone. Alice is very involved in the Methodist Children’s Homes in Alabama, including group homes in Dothan and Huntsville.

Every spring the “Mockingbird Players,” a group of local citizens, put on a production of To Kill a Mockingbird that brings thousands of visitors to Monroeville. Tickets sell out almost immediately. Act one takes place on the lawn of the County Courthouse. The second act is set inside the courtroom, and jurors (all men) are picked from the audience.

Mel’s Dairy Dream, a drive-through ice-cream stand, sits on the lot where Nelle’s childhood home used to be on South Alabama Avenue. Next door to Mel’s is an empty lot with a stone fence and a historical marker noting Truman Capote’s boyhood home. A Conoco Service station stands where the Boulware house used to be in the 1930s. For Heaven’s Sakes, the only bookstore in town, closed a few years ago, and it did not carry To Kill a Mockingbird.

Nelle does not want a historical marker with her name. When citizens of Monroeville suggested the idea of a “Harper Lee Day” to her, she turned them down flat. She also turned down an offer to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006 but sent a letter that was published in O magazine. In the letter, she wrote of the comfort of curling up in bed with a book as a child. “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.”

Two recent films about Truman’s research and writing of In Cold Blood, Capote and Infamous, depict Nelle’s friendship with Truman. Nelle told Wayne Greenhaw, “The first one [actress Catherine Keener] had my name but that was the end of any likeness. And if New York had a party for my premiere they didn’t invite me. However, the Capote actor [Philip Seymour Hoffman] got it.” As for Sandra Bullock’s portrayal of her in Infamous, Nelle only said, “I never wore socks.”

For many years, Nelle spent most of her time in New York, a city she considered her real home. When there, Nelle loved cheering for the New York Mets, but when company came to town she would suffer through a Yankees game if necessary. A friend said, “New York is truly her home, but she came back [to Monroeville] for Alice.” Later, Nelle lived half the year in New York and half in Monroeville, returning to Monroeville each September to celebrate Alice’s birthday. Nelle, now in her eighties, and Alice, in her nineties, have spent their senior years together exploring the back roads of lower Alabama. Alice said, “We go out in every nook and cranny. We explore. If a new road opens up, we try it. We have done that all our lives.”

Neither sister ever married, but they remain close to their other sister, Louise, and her family. In 1997, Louise said, “I wish she would talk. I’m very proud of her. I’m very proud of my other sister too. In a way, Alice is more remarkable, because she’s 86 years old and still a practicing attorney. I’d love to talk about my sister to you, but I know how my sister feels. I don’t want to do anything to mar the love we have for each other.”

Alice and Nelle are both in frail health, but they keep each other going. Alice is deaf but wears a hearing aid, and Nelle, going deaf, also suffers from macular degeneration, which makes it difficult to read—the thing that gives her the most pleasure. She currently resides full-time in Monroeville due to a stroke she suffered in November 2007. But her health has been improving, and she celebrated her eighty-second birthday quietly with friends who said she was looking frail but feeling better. She was well enough to travel to Birmingham in May 2008 to receive an honorary law degree bestowed on her by the Alabama Bar Association. She was awarded the honor for creating the character of Atticus Finch who “has become the personification of the exemplary lawyer in serving the legal needs of the poor.”

In 1964, Nelle told Roy Newquist that all she wanted was to be the Jane Austen of South Alabama. In the same interview, she talked about how much writing meant to her:

You know, many writers don’t like to write . . . I like to write. Sometimes, I’m afraid that I like it too much because when I get into work I don’t want to leave it. As a result I’ll go for days and days without leaving the house or wherever I happen to be. I’ll go out long enough to get papers and pick up some food and that’s it. It’s strange, but instead of hating writing, I love it too much.

Reliable sources requesting anonymity say that Nelle has written another book, called The Reverend, but it is in an undisclosed vault and to be published posthumously. The book, if it exists, is said to be the story of a true crime, written in the vein of In Cold Blood. The subject is a deceased minister, Reverend William Maxwell, from eastern Alabama, who was a practitioner of voodoo. Maxwell was most notorious for the fact that five of his relatives died under mysterious circumstances, and he was the beneficiary of each victim’s life insurance policy. At the fifth funeral service another relative got even and killed Maxwell.

Nelle lived in Alex City, Alabama, for a time in the 1980s to research the case. Maxwell’s lawyer, Tom Radney, who gave her the case files to study, said, “I found Nelle Lee to be warm, charming, and extremely intelligent. She is not a recluse by any means. I think the reason she doesn’t like publicity is, to her, that would be flaunting her success. And she’s not that type.” Nelle was also given files of background information by journalist Jim Earnhardt, who covered the trials. Wayne Greenhaw said she quit writing the book because it was going to wind up being more about the insurance companies than the crime itself, but others say the book exists. In 1997 Radney said, “I still talk to Nelle twice a year, and every time we talk she says she’s still working on it.”