Harper Lee is perhaps the only writer for whom the phrase “one-hit wonder” has always been used in veneration rather than denigration. In the half century since it was published, To Kill a Mockingbird has become one of the most beloved books of all time. For the few who need their memory jogged, or for the even fewer who have never read it, the novel takes place in a small town in Alabama where Atticus Finch, a white lawyer, defends a black man, Tom Robinson, who’s been accused of rape. Scout, Atticus’s tomboy daughter who ages from six to eight in the story, is the narrator. Lee was warned the novel would probably sell a couple of thousand copies at most. Instead, it was an instant bestseller and its author a literary phenomenon.
The fact that no book followed it only seemed to enhance its standing: there was a sense of a writer having said everything she had to say, perfectly. The book came to be seen as irreproachable and, through her retirement from public life and solid refusal of fame, so too did its author. “People who write for reward by way of recognition or monetary gain don’t know what they’re doing,” she once said. “They’re in the category of those who write; they are not writers.”
Then, last Wednesday, it was announced that the 88-year-old author will publish a second novel this summer. Published by HarperCollins in the US and by Heinemann in the UK, Go Set a Watchman will be released to the world on 15 July.
When an editor called Tay Hohoff first read the manuscript in 1960 he suggested to Lee that she write a new novel from the perspective of Scout as a child. This became To Kill a Mockingbird; in other words, her classic is in some ways a sequel to the novel that will be published this summer, rather than the other way round. Its main character is once again Scout, this time as a young woman, who returns to her childhood home to visit her father. In her characteristically plain-spoken way, Lee said: “I thought it a pretty decent effort.”
The news was seismic. Five months before it hits the shelves, the book is already at the top of Amazon’s bestseller list, with its canonical predecessor in the number two spot.
But soon after the delight came the doubts: why now, after all these years? After her always saying that she’d never publish again? Has an elderly and possibly infirm author been coerced into releasing a book she never wanted published?
Many drew attention to the fact that her sister, Alice, who was her lawyer and advocate for decades (Lee lovingly described her as “Atticus in a skirt”) died last year at the age of 103. Her biographer, Charles J Shields, was of the opinion that Lee was “an elderly woman who’s getting poor advice” and doubted whether Alice would have allowed the project to go forward. National Public Radio, in the US, was among many outlets wondering whether she was being taken advantage of in her old age.
Andrew Nurnberg, Lee’s foreign rights agent, dismissed all this as “total nonsense” and added: “This all happened in September, way before Miss Alice’s death, and she would not have been against this – she probably would have been very proud of her sister.”
The manuscript was rediscovered by Lee’s lawyer and long-time friend Tonja Carter while looking through a safety deposit box. Tucked below the original manuscript for To Kill a Mockingbird was this even earlier effort that Lee had not realised still survived. She made a stoutly cheery statement, pronouncing herself “alive and kicking and happy as hell” at the reaction to its publication.
The underlying anxiety from everyone else may have less to do with Lee’s welfare than with the collective emotional protectiveness that enshrines To Kill a Mockingbird, a book most readers first come to as teenagers, an age when fiction marks us the hardest. If the forthcoming book isn’t that good, will it impugn the hallowed status of the first? Perhaps that’s impossible. The novel won countless official accolades, not least the Pulitzer prize, but its more popular triumphs speak louder. In 2006, for example, British librarians voted it as the one book every adult should read before they die, beating the Bible, among others. Its total sales to date are estimated at around 40 million.
George Bush, awarding Lee the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007, said: “To Kill a Mockingbird has influenced the character of our country for the better. It’s been a gift to the entire world. As a model of good writing and humane sensibility, this book will be read and studied forever.” Weeks after this, Lee suffered a stroke that left her in a wheelchair and struggling with her sight and hearing. She sold her Manhattan apartment in the Upper East Side and moved back to Monroeville, Alabama, her hometown.
Lee has always rejected the idea that her novel is pure autobiography, countering that a writer “should write about what he knows and write truthfully”. What she knows is the small town life of the American deep south at a time when Rosa Parks had yet to resist giving up her seat on a Montgomery bus and the country’s Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation.
Lee was born in 1926, to a man who seems the model of Atticus: Amasa Coleman Lee, a lawyer. He and his wife, Frances Cunningham Finch Lee, had four children and Nelle Harper Lee was their youngest. As a child, she befriended a neighbouring boy called Truman Streckfus Persons who became the person we know as Truman Capote. The two were reunited in New York when Lee moved there in 1949 – a time when Capote’s literary career was already under way and Lee, by many accounts, felt like his dumpy, unsuccessful sidekick. Each, however, would do the other the honour of an affectionate fictional portrait: Dill, Scout’s friend in To Kill a Mockingbird, “whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings and quaint fancies”, is based on Capote, while the tomboyish Idabel, in Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, is his tribute to Lee.
Soon after finishing the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird she joined Capote on assignment for the New Yorker in Kansas, where he investigated the murders of a wealthy farming family, the Clutters. Capote wrote of his friend: “She is a gifted woman, courageous, and with a warmth that instantly kindles most people, however suspicious or dour,” and it was this warmth, particularly compared with his self-centred flamboyance, that was the pair’s great asset when it came to winning the trust of sources for the story. In Cold Blood was published in 1966 to great acclaim but Capote never publicly acknowledged the reporting and research his friend conducted for the book. By this point, however, Lee’s literary celebrity had eclipsed his.
Having abandoned law school, she’d been working as an airline reservation clerk while writing, without much hope, on the side. Then, in 1956, she received a gift from her friends – a year’s salary so that she could devote herself to writing. Lee saw it thus: “A full, fair chance for a new life. Not given me by an act of generosity, but by an act of love. Our faith in you was really all I had heard them say.”
Her faith in herself, however, wavered. Once, she flung the manuscript out the window of her New York apartment into the snow. Her agent commanded her to retrieve it. Soon after, the novel was finished.
In 1962, Horton Foote adapted the book for the big screen and Gregory Peck was cast as Atticus. Lee was not alone in thinking that this was one of the best film adaptations of a book ever made. The film was nominated in eight categories at the Oscars and won three of them, including best actor for Peck.
Since then, she’s lived a life that matched the steadfast, unshowy morality of her novel, staunchly refusing a public life, although not a social one – she’s a recluse only when it comes to journalists.
In 2011, however, Lee’s close friend Dr Thomas Butts spoke to an Australian newspaper: “She once said to me when we were up late one night, sharing a bottle of scotch, ‘You ever wonder why I never wrote anything else?’ And I said, ‘Well, along with a million other people, yes’.” Her answer, he said, was as follows: “Two reasons: one, I wouldn’t go through the pressure and publicity I went through with To Kill a Mockingbird for any amount of money. Second, I have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.”
Lee once told Oprah Winfrey that she felt she was less like Scout and more like Boo Radley, the novel’s intensely reclusive, but benevolent, neighbourhood loner. We can only hope that, unlike Boo, she’s been coaxed out of her darkness willingly.
Born Nelle Harper Lee, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee, a lawyer, and his wife, Frances Cunningham Finch. Born and raised in Monroeville, Alabama
Best of times In 1961, a year after its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird wins the Pulitzer prize.
Worst of times In 2007, Lee suffers a stroke that leaves her largely deaf and blind. She moves back to her home town, Monroeville.
She says “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.”
They say “Sometimes novels are considered ‘important’ in the way medicine is – they taste terrible and are difficult to get down, but are good for you. The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre. Harper Lee’s triumph is one of those.”
