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Posted on 10/21/2025 11:07:51 AM PDT by Red Badger
Molly Lee is talking to me about the tales her aunt Nelle, known to the world as Harper Lee, would weave for her when she was a little girl. "She was just a great storyteller," says the 77-year-old from her home in Alabama.
That's an understatement if the success of Harper Lee's Pulitzer-prize winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird is anything to go by. Since its publication in 1960, when it was an instant hit, the book has sold more than 42 million copies worldwide
Based around the story of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of rape, it's told through the eyes of two white children, Jean Louise 'Scout' Finch and her brother Jem - and is often described as an American classic.
But at the point Molly is describing, before the world had heard of Lee, she was simply an aunt enchanting her niece with stories, often by riffing on one of her favourite authors, the British novelist Daphne Du Maurier.
"The stories that she told me, she would make them up but they all seemed to be based around, 'It was a dark and stormy night'... It seemed to me they were always on the moor and she would just take me into the dark," Molly says.
Molly's cousin is 77-year-old Ed Lee Conner. His earliest memories of his aunt date back to the late 1940s, when he was tiny. "She sang to me in a way that was very funny," he recalls. "And I laughed."
He gives me a rendition, half-singing I've Got a Little List from the musical The Mikado. Ed says he only realised much later that "she was singing to me songs from Gilbert and Sullivan", the Victorian-era duo Lee "adored" all her life.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
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Books & Word Ping!...................
Thanks for the ping.
I had no idea Lee was a G&S fan, LOL.
In the original Song, The “Lady Novelist” was on the list.
Her hometown (and Truman Capote’s) Monroeville, AL is just a little northwest of here................
Interesting!
Supposedly the story in To Kill A Mockingbird was taken from a real life incident in another town that she heard about when she was a child.
She and Truman Capote were childhood friends and they both travelled as adults to Kansas together to research a heinous murder that had happened there recently, which became Capote’s “In Cold Blood”................
I don’t think she wanted “The Watchman on the Wall” to be published.
They waited till she died to publish it.
Same thing with Chopin’s last nocture. He didn’t want to publish it, and MOST concert pianists respect the Composer’s wishes.
There’s stuff I’ve written that I hope NEVER sees the light of day! LOL!
She was very important to the book's blossoming, being so respectable and respectful to the Kansans whose perspectives were necessary to tell the tale well - not to mention her same relationship with Capote. I doubt he could have written quite the same masterpiece without having such a great "research assistant."
The character Dill Harris in “Mockingbird” was based on Capote.
Additional info on the Lee / Capote relationship:
https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/harper-lee-truman-capote-friendship-jealously
On the other hand the world is thankful Caesar Augustus did not do the wish of Virgil concerning THE AENEID..
It reads Pollyannish seventy years later.
We had to watch the movie in grade school.
In 2025, Tom Robinson has been arrested and released 111 times.
Ooops sorry about the title.
Shows how much the book meant to me.
LOL. I stand corrected. Thank You.
Well, there is that.
On a related note to the spirit of this thread: Are there any other fans of the "Claremont Review of Books" here on FR?
Same character names, but not the same canon or part of the same story. Some said it showed Atticus Finch had different motives than what were portrayed in To Kill a Mockingbird...but in reality, it was not the same “Atticus Finch.”
Oh, of course. Totally different. That's the controversy. One idea abandoned, but with potential, later revamped.
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