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Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee
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Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Leeby Charles J. Shields
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful: Clears up a lot of mistaken impressions., June 26, 2006 Reviewer:Dave Schwinghammer "Dave Schwinghammer" (Little Falls, Minnesota USA) - Having taught TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD every year for sixteen years, I had to read this new biography of the seclusive author. The author, Charles J. Shields, who wrote it without Lee's cooperation, cleared up several mistaken impressions for me. For one thing, I had always thought that Harper Lee was a lawyer and that was one of the reasons she hadn't written anything since TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. She did go to law school, but dropped out with a semester left to go to New York to write full time. Shields focuses on several questions. Why did Lee not follow up the amazing success of TKAM with another novel? Did Truman Capote really write the book? Why did Nelle Harper Lee never marry? To answer the first, she had a hundred pages of a second novel before TKAM was published, but several factors intruded on its completion. One was her obligation to promote the novel and later the movie. The second was her collaboration with Truman Capote on IN COLD BLOOD, which also answers the second question. Nelle Harper contributed more to IN COLD BLOOD than Truman Capote did TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Why she never married is inconclusive; Capote said she had a love affair with a law professor during her college years; Shields also hints that there may have been a romantic relationship with her married agent, Maurice Crain, but there's no doubt she was a tomboy and an eccentric well into her college years and never had much interest in men. Personally, I found the section on IN COLD BLOOD most compelling. The people around Garden City and Holcomb, Kansas, found Truman Capote about as easy to like as an alien from another planet. Nelle made friends and smoothed the way for his interviews. She also took copious notes. Another interesting element was the apparent biographical content of her novel. Dill was definitely Truman Capote, who lived right next door in Monroeville, Alabama. There was a real Boo Radley; Atticus, of course, was based on her father, A.C.; Aunt Alexandra was modeled after her mother. The name Finch came from her mother's maiden name. Then there's the movie. Originally, Nelle wanted Spencer Tracy to play Atticus. It's also interesting to see how the focus of the movie changed from the children to Atticus and the Tom Robinson trial. A shortcoming of the book is that Shields was never able to find out what the supposed second novel was about. Lee also tried to write a non-fiction book based on insurance scam murders where the man who committed them kept getting off. Shields says that the book was supposedly in production, but nothing ever came of it. Shields is forced to rely on a lot of hearsay because of Nelle's reluctance to be interviewed. For instance, a family member said that the second book was stolen during a burglary, and Nelle didn't have the heart to start over again. For me, it was most instructive to follow Lee's early years in New York. Eventually she met the right people, Maurice Cain and her editor from Lippincott, but she spent almost ten years working as an airline ticket agent and fumbling with a series of sketches about Monroeville before Theresa von Hohoff whipped her project into shape. Not surprisingly, when von Hohoff and Cain died, Lee completely lost her will to pursue her literary ambitions
From Publishers Weekly
Few novels are as beloved and acclaimed as To Kill a Mockingbird and even fewer authors have shunned the spotlight as successfully as its author. Although journalist Shields interviewed 600 of Harper Lee's acquaintances and researched the papers of her childhood friend Truman Capote, he is no match for the elusive Lee, who stopped granting interviews in 1965 and wouldn't talk to him. Much of this first full-length biography of Lee is filled with inconsequential anecdotes focusing on the people around her, while the subject remains stubbornly out of focus. Shields enlivens Lee's childhood by pointing out people who were later fictionalized in her novel. The book percolates during her banner year of 1960, when she won the Pulitzer Prize and helped Capote research In Cold Blood. Capote's papers yield some of Lee's fascinating first-person insights on the emotionally troubled Clutter family that were tempered in his book. Shields believes Lee abandoned her second novel when her agents and her editor—her surrogate family in publishing—died or left the business, leaving her with no support system. There's a tantalizing anecdote about a true-crime project Lee was researching in the mid-'80s that faded away. Sputtering to a close, the final chapter covers the last 35 years in 24 pages. It's also baffling that this affectionate biography ends with three paragraphs devoted to someone slamming her classic work. (June 6)
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Harper Lee is famous not only for her perennially best-selling first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), but also for never having published a second one and for being relatively reclusive, not having granted interviews since the mid-1960s. Born in Monroeville, Alabama, Lee was a childhood friend of another famous writer, Truman Capote, and their friendship lasted until his death. In fact, Lee accompanied Capote to Kansas and contributed considerable time assisting him in researching the murders that were the basis of his masterpiece, In Cold Blood (1966). Lee was always unconventional, never adhering to rules established by, first, her mother, and, then, society. She attended college because she was supposed to, but dropped out and moved to New York to write. Without having heard the words directly from Lee (this book was written without her cooperation), Shields cannot explain exactly why there has never been a second novel, but his estimation of the situation is credible. An informative and genial biography that literary fiction lovers will flock to. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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