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Writer and editor Home > Blogs > Brain Droppings > Archives > 2008 > April > 28 > Entry
Happy Birthday, Harper Lee!
Today is Harper Lee’s birthday… Down below you’ll find a nice little blurb on her courtesy, as always, of our very good friends at The Writer’s Almanac.
You know, before I offer that I must make the following literary confession: I have never been able to finish “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
I have tried, many times. Five or six, at least, dating all the way back to high school. I’ve seen the movie, of course, and like it. But I have never been able to get through the book. I know it’s good, but I always bog down in the middle. It seems too simple to me, and a bit too goody-goody. I know, I know… I’m awful. I’ve been told. And I’ll probably try it again… But I’m starting to think it might be the book, not me.
BTW, if you haven’t seen the portrayals of Harper Lee in the recent films about her cousin, Truman Capote, in “Capote” and “Infamous,” you definitely should. They’re both worthwhile.
Here’s the bio.
Now I feel bad, just talking about the book. Maybe I’ll try again this week.
It’s the birthday of (Nelle) Harper Lee ) the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), born in Monroeville, Alabama (1926), the daughter of a local newspaper editor and lawyer. She was a friend from childhood of Truman Capote, and she later traveled to Kansas with him to help with the research of his work for In Cold Blood (1966). In college, she worked on the humor magazine Ramma-Jamma. She attended law school at the University of Alabama, but dropped out before earning a degree, moving to New York to pursue a writing career. She later said that her years in law school were “good training for a writer.”
To support herself while writing, she worked for several years as a reservation clerk at British Overseas Airline Corporation and at Eastern Air Lines. In December of 1956, some of her New York friends gave her a year’s salary along with a note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” She decided to devote herself to writing and moved into an apartment with only cold water and improvised furniture.
Lee wrote very slowly, extensively revising for two and a half years on the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird (which she had called at different times “Go Set a Watchman” and “Atticus”). She called herself “more a rewriter than writer,” and on a winter night in 1958, she was so frustrated with the progress of her novel and its many drafts that she threw the manuscripts out the window of her New York apartment into the deep snow below. She called her editor to tell him, and he convinced her to go outside and collect the papers.
To Kill a Mockingbird came out in 1960 and was immediately a popular and critical success. Lee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. A review in The Washington Post read, “A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Lee later said, “I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”
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