Posted on 07/12/2010 11:26:04 AM PDT by JoeProBono
Reclusive author talks to Mail on Sunday for 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, but reporter had to promise not to mention her Pulitzer-winning novel:
Along with Thomas Pynchon and the late JD Salinger, Harper Lee is one of the world's most famous literary recluses. But the author of To Kill a Mockingbird has been tempted out of her self-imposed isolation – by none other than the Mail on Sunday.
Admittedly, Lee – who is now 84 and lives in sheltered housing in her childhood home of Monroeville, Alabama – gave away very little to the reporter, who had to promise not to mention her Pulitzer prize-winning story of racism in the American south, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year..
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
About 3 or 4 weeks ago the Wall Street Journal produced a review of Mockingbird in light of the 50 year anniversary. Basically WSJ said the book is a simple children’s book which followed a very predictable script. The bad guys were bad and the good guys were good. In essence, Lee Harper was the master of the obvious. I showed my wife and high school daughter the article and we were all distressed with the article’s tone and conclusion. We had all been very positive about the book and continue to be.
Pat Conroy’s Lords of Discipline has similarities to End as a Man written in 1947 by Calder Willingham.
Did their time at The Citadel lead to both writing similar tales or did Conroy read Willingham and “borrow” from the earlier book?
Monday, February 20, 2006
DID TRUMAN CAPOTE SELL HIS SOUL FOR A BIT OF FAME AND FORTUNE?
Why Truman Capote and Harper Lee took different routes after achieving fame and fortune: Harry Mount of The Telegraph has a theory:
The goddess of fame is not for mocking
By Harry Mount
(Filed: 20/02/2006)
Of all the accolades for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role as Truman Capote in the new film, Capote, the greatest was the shortest. It came from Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird and Capote’s childhood friend, played by Catherine Keener in an Oscar-nominated performance. Her message simply said that Seymour Hoffman had got Capote right.
By Lee’s standards, this short note is an exceptional piece of self-exposure. After To Kill A Mockingbird came out in 1960, winning the Pulitzer Prize a year later, she went back to Monroeville, the little town in Alabama where she and Capote were brought up. She never left, and the woman who once said she wanted to be the Jane Austen of south Alabama has never written another book. Since 1960, she has written precisely four articles, none of them longer than eight pages.
She hasn’t given a personal interview for 40 years and doesn’t plan to ever again. I asked her for one to mark her 80th birthday in a few weeks’ time and she refused. She did agree to talk to the New York Times last month about an Alabama high school contest for an essay based on her book, but she would talk only about the students and the contest; not about herself or To Kill A Mockingbird.
The only clue to her seclusion came in her last personal interview, in 1964. She said of her book: “I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement - public encouragement. I hoped for a little, 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.”
So her escape from death was an escape back to her childhood: she still shares a house in Monroeville with her 94-year-old sister, Alice, who, like their father, the role model for Atticus Finch in the book, is a lawyer.
The people of Monroeville regularly hold re-enactments of the To Kill A Mockingbird trial in the old town courtroom, where Harper Lee’s father and sister appeared - and, in the case of the latter, appear: Alice is still a practising lawyer. Harper never attends the re-enactments.
Truman Capote, who loved fame and its trappings, was astonished by Lee’s flight into obscurity. Just after To Kill A Mockingbird was published, he wrote about Lee to a friend, saying, “Poor thing - she is nearly demented: says she gave up trying to answer her ‘fan mail’ when she received 62 letters in one day. I wish she could relax and enjoy it more: in this profession, it’s a long walk between drinks.”
It turns out that it’s better to walk than drink. Harper Lee was perfectly happy, fit and well, when last spotted at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where the essay-writing prize in her name was handed out last month.
Truman Capote, meanwhile, gave up walks and stuck to the drinks - and the drugs. He died of an overdose in Los Angeles in 1984, a month shy of his 60th birthday, but what really killed him was his desire for fame and attention.
While Lee stayed quietly in Monroeville, he rushed round the world, singing for over-priced suppers in grander and grander palaces with grander and grander people.
I can't recall its title, but it involved Capote living with his maiden aunts, one being special needs.
Capote and this aunt made fruitcakes for the holidays and gave them to aquiantaces they met.
That movie had the same feel as TKAMB.
*snicker* Will I have to give my spelling trophy back ? :-P
One-hit-wonders abound all over the place, Woodward and Bernstein come immediately to mind -- this is no indication whatever that someone else must have written this particular.
Margaret Mitchell never published anything besides Gone with the Wind. There was a manuscript discovered after she died which was published. Maybe something else of Lee’s will surface later.
From Wikipedia...
For decades it was thought that Mitchell had only ever written one complete novel. (In fact, periodically claims are made that she never wrote it at all due to the lack of any other published work by her). But in the 1990s, a manuscript by Mitchell of a novel entitled Lost Laysen was discovered among a collection of letters Mitchell had given in the early 1920s to a suitor named Henry Love Angel. The manuscript had been written in two notebooks in 1916. In the 1990s, Angel’s son discovered the manuscript and sent it to the Road to Tara Museum, which authenticated the work. A special edition of Lost Laysen — a romance set in the South Pacific — was edited by Debra Freer, augmented with an account of Mitchell and Angel’s romance including a number of her letters to him, and published by the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster in 1996.
Likewise, the June 2010 Smithsonian Magazine did a retrospective on Lee and addressed the Capote rumors stating:
“Once interviewers broached the subject of Capote, Lee might have braced herself for a question that would have been not just annoying but insulting: Wasn’t it true that her pal Truman had written much of her book? Capote—always competitive, and, of course, a bit of a crackpot—didn’t discourage the rumor, answering vaguely when asked about his contributions to her novel. The truth (as is evident from Capote’s private correspondence) is that he did not write a word of Mockingbird, and that Lee, who assisted him as a reporter and researcher on In Cold Blood, contributed substantially more to Capote’s 1966 blockbuster than he ever admitted. Still, the rumor persists—to the point where it is addressed (and debunked) in one of the Monroeville museum’s exhibits.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Harper-Lees-Novel-Achievement.html
LOL No just be more careful in future.
you lie
Umm, she was also a newspaper columnist who had a couple hundred articles published. Plus, that manuscript you mentioned and lets not forget she died young only 10 years after her big novel. ..
If this is the the template explaining the paucity of writing from 84 year old Harper Lee (who wont even talk about her only novel); its not a perfect one by any measure.
Nope. When the Smithsonian investigated that rumor, what it found was that Harper Lee had written Capote's work.
He didn't. Philip Marlowe wrote it.
And his other dozen novels as well? Methinks the Smithsonian has no reason to take the dissolute Capote's word against Ms. Lee's .(he's dead, she isn't) Clearly, the characters from the book originated with her, but I think thats as far as she got. JMO.
>>Proof of this claim, please? I’m googling your statement, but if you’d like to offer backup, it would be appreciated.
It’s rather difficult to prove a negative; that’s Logic 101.
To disprove it, all you have to do is show she wrote something else of note. Can you? If it is possible to do so, it should be trivial in the Age of the Internet.
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