It is a long way from New York City to western Kansas – not quite to the Colorado border, but close. At the end of 1959, novelist Harper Lee, at that point an unknown, began a train ride from New York to Garden City, Kan., in the company of her childhood friend, author-socialite Truman Capote.
Today, Lee is celebrated for the only book she published, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The crucial role she played in the research and writing of Capote’s “nonfiction novel,” the controversial “In Cold Blood,” is less known.
Learning about the Lee-Capote friendship forged during childhood in the unlikely locale of Monroeville, Ala., is one of the many pleasures found in Charles J. Shield’s portrait for the author, “Mockingbird.”
When “To Kill a Mockingbird” became one of the best-known novels of all time 45 years ago, its author became an unlikely celebrity. In her mid-30s when fame arrived, Lee had moved to New York City a decade earlier despite the disapproval of her lawyer father and his law partner, Harper’s eldest sister Alice.
Lee knew, just knew, she could write a publishable novel. Supported in New York City partly by family money and partly by wages earned outside the publishing world, Lee completed her manuscript about a racially charged rape case, about the companionship of children, about suspicion and trust. Assisted by a talented literary agent and a talented editor, Lee revised the manuscript into something memorable.
The transformation of the novel into a movie starring Gregory Peck spread Lee’s renown and increased the pressure on her to publish a second novel. That never happened. This year, Lee turns 80. Her fame will never die. But because she is a semi-recluse and because her failure to publish again has turned her life into a mystery, a biography about her seemed way too challenging to most writers.
Shields, a former schoolteacher who used “To Kill a Mockingbird” in his classroom, failed to crack the wall of silence Lee has built around herself. Still, Shields’ “portrait,” something short of a full-scale biography, is captivating.
He explains how Lee’s father and Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote morphed into the fictional characters Atticus Finch and Dill Harris. He elucidates how Lee left New York City for rural Kansas with Capote to help him research what became his infamous “nonfiction novel.”
Shields raises more questions about Lee’s life than he provides answers, but that is not all bad. He makes the ghostly woman flesh and blood, so that readers can speculate on their own why her story turned out so unexpectedly.
Steve Weinberg is a director of the National Book Critics Circle.
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Mockingbird
A Portrait of Harper Lee
By Charles J. Shields
Henry Holt, 352 pages, $25
