Novelist Harper Lee has died.
To Kill A Mockingbird, her 1960 novel set in the American South during the Depression, made her famous. The powerful story of a white southern lawyer’s decision to defend a black man wrongly accused of rape and the impact his choice has on his family became an enduring classic, eventually selling 40 million copies. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie starring Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar for his performance as attorney Atticus Finch.
But her fame dogged her. She was a recluse with no desire to talk to media reps who wanted her opinions on everything, especially the burgeoning civil rights movement. (Decades later black activists would complain about Mockingbird’s popularity and the fact that its perspective – especially with regard to the Finch family’s maid, Calpurnia – is so unblinkingly white.) But unlike her childhood friend Truman Capote – on whom the book’s character Dill is based – she was not interested in courting celebrity and stubbornly kept to herself.
She was equally insistent on never writing another book.
“I got it right the first time,” she famously said.
Turns out, she didn’t. A previous manuscript that had originally been rejected by her publisher, Go Set A Watchman, was discovered and published in 2015. Its release was highly controversial. In the book, an adult Scout remains fiercely independent – a proto-feminist disinterested in marriage – but her father, Atticus, speaks like an unrepentant racist. It was her editor who suggested she write another novel about a court trial referred to only tangentially in Go Set A Watchman.
Even more problematic was the situation leading up to the release. Given Lee’s advancing age, her earlier insistence that she wouldn’t write another novel and the sketchy quality of the story itself, some were not entirely convinced that she had approved its publication.
But her appeal was so immense that the book topped the bestseller list for weeks.
We’ll never know exactly what she felt about that.
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
