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Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee
by Charles J. Shields
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"A biographer needs to shape the stories of a life into a narrative that makes sense. Shields's biography is noteworthy only because it is the first. That a better one will emerge is inevitable so long as To Kill a Mockingbird remains compulsory reading for every twelve-year-old in America." Deborah Friedell, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopses & Reviews The colorful life of the remarkable woman who created To Kill a Mockingbird — the classic that became a touchstone for generations of Americans To Kill a Mockingbird, the twentieth-century's most widely read American novel, has sold thirty million copies and still sells a million yearly. Yet despite the book's perennial popularity, its creator, Harper Lee has become a somewhat mysterious figure. Now, after years of research, Charles J. Shields has brought to life the warmhearted, high-spirited, and occasionally hardheaded woman who gave us two of American literature's most unforgettable characters — Atticus Finch and his daughter, Scout — and who contributed to the success of her lifelong friend Truman Capote's masterpiece, In Cold Blood. At the center of Shields's lively book is the story of Lee's struggle to create her famous novel. But her life contains many other highlights as well: her girlhood as a tomboy in overalls in tiny Monroeville, Alabama; the murder trial that made her beloved father's reputation and inspired her great work; her journey to Kansas as Capote's ally and research assistant to help report the story of the Clutter murders; the surrogate family she found in New York City. Drawing on six hundred interviews and much new information, Mockingbird is the first book ever written about Harper Lee. Highly entertaining, filled with humor and heart, this is an evocative portrait of a writer, her dream, and the place and people whom she made immortal. Review: "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)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "Once upon a time, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' was merely the fledgling effort of an unknown Southern writer — then known as Nelle Harper Lee — from a small town in Alabama. When the novel was first submitted to a publishing house, the editors turned it down, noting its lack of structure and encouraging Lee to revise it. With steadfast persistence, she worked on her manuscript until it was finally deemed ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) publishable. 'To Kill a Mockingbird' hit the bookstores in 1960. Within weeks, it had become a best-seller. Forty-five years later, it is practically an industry of its own: To date, more than 30 million copies have been sold, and by 1988 three-quarters of the public schools in America were teaching it. Despite the novel's success, Lee, as is widely known, never published another book; instead, she retreated to her home town of Monroeville, Ala., where she has given few interviews since 1964. In the eyes of the public, she has long become nearly as invisible as her indelible shut-in, Boo Radley, though she recently gave an interview to the New York Times and wrote a short essay for O magazine. Now we have Charles J. Shields' 'Mockingbird,' the first book-length treatment of her life. An unauthorized biography, it relies largely on interviews and 'other sorts of communication' with Lee's acquaintances to trace her life from childhood through the publication of the novel and the years following, during which Lee struggled to write a second book. 'Mockingbird' is less a biography than, as its subtitle claims, 'a portrait,' and like all portraits, it is highly subjective. More dogged than shrewd, it is hardly the definitive treatment Lee merits, nor is it a particularly perceptive argument about the place of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' in American literature. (Shields has also written biographies for young adults.) However, it usefully and often entertainingly compiles and organizes information about Lee's life and offers a plausible answer to the question that preoccupies so many readers: Why did Lee never write another book — and why did she retreat from the public? For Shields, the answer lies in Lee's birthplace and in her paradoxical personality. Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, a small town in which everyone knew each other's business. She was a saucy yet shy child. Her father, like Atticus Finch, was a lawyer with a civic-minded bent that he instilled in his three daughters and one son — though, as Shields points out, Lee's father was long a supporter of segregation. Her mother was an invalid, who, it seems, suffered either from manic depression or an undiagnosed mental illness; she did very little mothering of Nelle, who was largely left to a maid's ministrations (much as Scout is in 'To Kill a Mockingbird'). In what proved to be a crucial event, the shy but saucy Lee met Truman Capote one summer when the 5-year-old boy was living with his aunts next door. Bonded by what Capote called their 'apartness,' the children began to write stories on an Underwood typewriter Lee's father gave them. The portrait that emerges from Shields' research in 'Mockingbird' is of a tomboyish young woman with little tolerance for pretension; she was remembered by one classmate as a 'deflater of phoniness.' In 1949, after giving up on getting a law degree at the University of Alabama (where she made few friends but sharpened her wit writing a column for the university newspaper titled 'Caustic Comment'), Lee moved to New York to follow in Capote's footsteps. Capote had already published a novel and — always the more outgoing of the two — he introduced her around town, but many of his friends found her dull. 'Here was this dumpy girl from Monroeville. We didn't think she was up to much. She said she was writing a book and that was that,' one recalled. Lee struggled to make a living until, with the financial assistance of Joy and Michael Brown, two artists whom she met through Capote, she sat down to write the novel that became 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' Shields deftly shows that Lee's editor, Tay Hohoff, was instrumental not only in getting the novel published but in shaping it into the book it is today. As Hohoff put it, 'The editorial call to duty was plain.' Lee needed 'professional help in organizing her material and developing a sound plot structure.' 'Mockingbird' is best where it deflates rumor and hearsay and fills in a more accurate picture of the woman. Shields makes a convincing case that Lee, a standoffish, stubborn woman invested in precision, became too 'overwhelmed' by the success of her first novel to finish any of her subsequent efforts. (Her sister told a reporter that Lee's second book, about hunting deer, was stolen shortly before completion, but the story rings false.) For Lee, he observes, writing was always about capturing the everyday nuances of Southern small-town life she knew so well — and, in her own way, loved; when she became famous, her relationship to that world was permanently altered. Shields persuasively demonstrates that, despite widespread rumors, it's highly unlikely that Capote had anything to do with 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' Rather, Shields shows that Lee actually contributed more to Capote's 'In Cold Blood' than is commonly thought, writing several hundred pages of notes on which Capote heavily relied. Even so, 'Mockingbird' fails to offer as nuanced a portrait of Lee as one would hope for or to cast much literary insight on 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' In the absence of reliable data from which to forge a coherent narrative, Shields follows his research down many a cul de sac and pads out trivial details (a whole page is dedicated to the movies that were nominated for various Oscars in 1962) while giving short shrift to complicated questions: Is 'To Kill a Mockingbird' a great novel or a sentimental, didactic one? Was Lee really a brilliant writer or an average one who, with great diligence and the support system of a talented editor and agent, was able to shape a highly autobiographical story that hit a cultural nerve in the years leading up to the civil rights movement? Readers who love 'To Kill a Mockingbird' will want to read this book for its tidbits of engaging info. But in the end, this is less a rigorous biography than a pleasant evocation of how one fiercely private woman was perceived by those around her. As such, it reminds us that a biography is, always, a fiction in its own right. Meghan O'Rourke is the culture editor of Slate magazine." Reviewed by Meghan O'Rourke, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "The best chapter details how Lee and her childhood friend Truman Capote went to Kansas to research the crime and its aftermath that would later become In Cold Blood." Library Journal Review: "Charles Shields is a former English teacher who taught Harper Lee's book, and a scrupulous journalist who respects the lady's privacy even as he opens up her life. This biography will not disappoint those who loved the novel and the feisty, independent, fiercely loyal Scout, in whom Harper Lee put so much of herself." Garrison Keillor Review: "The biography's strengths are all the ways it brings together pieces of Lee's life to form the portrait of its subtitle....The biography may leave readers wanting more, but it conveys a fuller sense of Lee's life and times worth having." Chicago Tribune Review: "Though the flattering biography is unauthorized...Shields' painstaking research does a great job in bringing out the complexity of Lee's character." Seattle Times Review: "An informative and genial biography that literary fiction lovers will flock to." Booklist Review: "There are many pages about Lee's collaboration with Truman Capote on In Cold Blood...with some attention to Capote's jealousy of Lee's success and his petty failure to acknowledge the great contributions she made." Kirkus Reviews Synopsis: The colorful life of the remarkable, rarely written-about woman who created To Kill a Mockingbird — the classic that became a touchstone for generations of Americans. About the Author A former English teacher who taught Harper Lee's novel for years, Charles J. Shields has a BA in English and an MA in American history from the University of Illinois, where he was a James Scholar. The author of many widely praised books for young people, he spent four years researching Mockingbird in Alabama, New York, and Kansas, speaking to hundreds of Lee's neighbors, friends, classmates, and culling facts from the archives of Truman Capote and other collections, as well as papers from the Monroe County (Alabama) courthouse and historical museum. He lives in central Virginia with his wife.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780805079197
- Subtitle:
- A Portrait of Harper Lee
- Author:
- Shields, Charles J.
- Publisher:
- Henry Holt & Company
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- Women
- Subject:
- American - General
- Subject:
- 20th century
- Subject:
- Authors, American
- Subject:
- Authors, American -- 20th century.
- Subject:
- Lee, Harper
- Copyright:
- 2006
- Publication Date:
- May 30, 2006
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 337
- Dimensions:
- 9.48x6.78x1.14 in. 1.42 lbs.
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