As novel 'Mockingbird' soared, author Lee grew more elusive
Lee was cited for her subtle, graceful style and gift for explaining the world through a child's eye, but the secret to the novel's ongoing appeal was also in how many books this single book contained.
By the accounts of friends and Monroeville residents, she was a warm, vibrant and witty woman who played golf, fished, ate at McDonald's, fed ducks by tossing seed corn out of a Cool Whip tub, read voraciously, and got about to plays and concerts.
"Mockingbird" inspired a generation of young lawyers and social workers, was assigned in high schools all over the country and was a popular choice for citywide, or nationwide, reading programs, although it was also occasionally removed from shelves for its racial content and references to rape.
When the Library of Congress did a survey in 1991 on books that have affected people's lives, "To Kill a Mockingbird" was second only to the Bible.
Claudia Durst Johnson, author of a book-length critical analysis of Lee's novel, described her as preferring to guard her privacy "like others in an older generation, who didn't go out and talk about themselves on Oprah or the Letterman show at the drop of a hat."
According to Johnson, Lee also complained that the news media invariably misquoted her.
Other than a few magazine pieces for Vogue and McCall's in the 1960s and a review of a 19th century Alabama history book in 1983, she published no other work until stunning the world in 2015 by permitting the novel "Go Set a Watchman" to be released.
The man who defied the status quo in "Mockingbird" was now part of the mob in "Watchman," denouncing the Supreme Court's ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional and denouncing blacks as unfit to enjoy full equality.
Charles J. Shields, in the first book-length attempt at a biography of Lee, "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee," showed how Lee helped Capote gain entrance to key figures in the murder investigation and provided keen observations and myriad notes that Capote wove into his book.
[...] with a Christmas loan from friends, she quit to write full time, and the first draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird" reached its publisher, J.B. Lippincott, in 1957.
Decades later, Toni Morrison would call it a "white savior" narrative, "one of those," she told The Associated Press, expressing a common objection that so many books by white people reduced blacks to passive, secondary roles.
"Mockingbird" features Scout's often meandering recollection of the people — some eccentric, such as the reclusive Boo Radley — in rural Maycomb County, during the years when her brother Jem reaches adolescence and she enters school.
The book's tension is built around the lynching atmosphere in Maycomb as the black man goes on trial, a scenario reminiscent of the Scottsboro Boys rape case of the same period.