Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #381682 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-30
• Released on: 2006-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Few novels are as beloved and acclaimed as To Kill a Mockingbird and even fewer authors have shunned the spotlight as successfully as its author. Although journalist Shields interviewed 600 of Harper Lee's acquaintances and researched the papers of her childhood friend Truman Capote, he is no match for the elusive Lee, who stopped granting interviews in 1965 and wouldn't talk to him. Much of this first full-length biography of Lee is filled with inconsequential anecdotes focusing on the people around her, while the subject remains stubbornly out of focus. Shields enlivens Lee's childhood by pointing out people who were later fictionalized in her novel. The book percolates during her banner year of 1960, when she won the Pulitzer Prize and helped Capote research In Cold Blood. Capote's papers yield some of Lee's fascinating first-person insights on the emotionally troubled Clutter family that were tempered in his book. Shields believes Lee abandoned her second novel when her agents and her editor—her surrogate family in publishing—died or left the business, leaving her with no support system. There's a tantalizing anecdote about a true-crime project Lee was researching in the mid-'80s that faded away. Sputtering to a close, the final chapter covers the last 35 years in 24 pages. It's also baffling that this affectionate biography ends with three paragraphs devoted to someone slamming her classic work. (June 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Shields takes on the elusive writer in this first-ever biography of her. Without direct input from his subject, the author's extensive research combines sources in local-history collections, interviews and correspondence with Lee's acquaintances, and Internet resources to piece together the details of the writer's life. Starting with Lee's childhood in Monroeville, AL, Shields depicts the people and events that inspired To Kill a Mockingbird's characters. A picture develops of a girl who would face down any bully, a nonconformist whose sorority roommates kicked her out after one semester but who made an impact on the campus with her presence, a woman with a wicked sense of humor and a writer with a voice and themes of prejudice and justice that resonate. Students and curious fans alike will find material here to further their understanding of her work and life. Extensive source notes and a student-friendly bibliography are included.–Charlotte Bradshaw, San Mateo County Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Once upon a time, To Kill a Mockingbird was merely the fledgling effort of an unknown Southern writer -- then known as Nelle Harper Lee -- from a small town in Alabama. When the novel was first submitted to a publishing house, the editors turned it down, noting its lack of structure and encouraging Lee to revise it. With steadfast persistence, she worked on her manuscript until it was finally deemed publishable. To Kill a Mockingbird hit the bookstores in 1960. Within weeks, it had become a bestseller. Forty-five years later, it is practically an industry of its own: To date, more than 30 million copies have been sold, and by 1988 three-quarters of the public schools in America were teaching it.

Despite the novel's success, Lee, as is widely known, never published another book; instead, she retreated to her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., where she has given few interviews since 1964. In the eyes of the public, she has long become nearly as invisible as her indelible shut-in, Boo Radley, though she recently gave an interview to the New York Times and wrote a short essay for O magazine.

Now we have Charles J. Shields's Mockingbird, the first book-length treatment of her life. An unauthorized biography, it relies largely on interviews and "other sorts of communication" with Lee's acquaintances to trace her life from childhood through the publication of the novel and the years following, during which Lee struggled to write a second book. Mockingbird is less a biography than, as its subtitle claims, "a portrait," and like all portraits, it is highly subjective. More dogged than shrewd, it is hardly the definitive treatment Lee merits, nor is it a particularly perceptive argument about the place of To Kill a Mockingbird in American literature. (Shields has also written biographies for young adults.) However, it usefully and often entertainingly compiles and organizes information about Lee's life and offers a plausible answer to the question that preoccupies so many readers: Why did Lee never write another book -- and why did she retreat from the public?

For Shields, the answer lies in Lee's birthplace and in her paradoxical personality. Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, a small town in which everyone knew each other's business. She was a saucy yet shy child. Her father, like Atticus Finch, was a lawyer with a civic-minded bent that he instilled in his three daughters and one son -- though, as Shields points out, Lee's father was long a supporter of segregation. Her mother was an invalid, who, it seems, suffered either from manic depression or an undiagnosed mental illness; she did very little mothering of Nelle, who was largely left to a maid's ministrations (much as Scout is in To Kill a Mockingbird).

In what proved to be a crucial event, the shy but saucy Lee met Truman Capote one summer when the 5-year-old boy was living with his aunts next door. Bonded by what Capote called their "apartness," the children began to write stories on an Underwood typewriter Lee's father gave them.

The portrait that emerges from Shields's research in Mockingbird is of a tomboyish young woman with little tolerance for pretension; she was remembered by one classmate as a "deflater of phoniness." In 1949, after giving up on getting a law degree at the University of Alabama (where she made few friends but sharpened her wit writing a column for the university newspaper titled "Caustic Comment"), Lee moved to New York to follow in Capote's footsteps. Capote had already published a novel and -- always the more outgoing of the two -- he introduced her around town, but many of his friends found her dull. "Here was this dumpy girl from Monroeville. We didn't think she was up to much. She said she was writing a book and that was that," one recalled. Lee struggled to make a living until, with the financial assistance of Joy and Michael Brown, two artists whom she met through Capote, she sat down to write the novel that became To Kill a Mockingbird.

Shields deftly shows that Lee's editor, Tay Hohoff, was instrumental not only in getting the novel published but in shaping it into the book it is today. As Hohoff put it, "The editorial call to duty was plain." Lee needed "professional help in organizing her material and developing a sound plot structure."

Mockingbird is best where it deflates rumor and hearsay and fills in a more accurate picture of the woman. Shields makes a convincing case that Lee, a standoffish, stubborn woman invested in precision, became too "overwhelmed" by the success of her first novel to finish any of her subsequent efforts. (Her sister told a reporter that Lee's second book, about hunting deer, was stolen shortly before completion, but the story rings false.) For Lee, he observes, writing was always about capturing the everyday nuances of Southern small-town life she knew so well -- and, in her own way, loved; when she became famous, her relationship to that world was permanently altered.

Shields persuasively demonstrates that, despite widespread rumors, it's highly unlikely that Capote had anything to do with To Kill a Mockingbird. Rather, Shields shows that Lee actually contributed more to Capote's In Cold Blood than is commonly thought, writing several hundred pages of notes on which Capote heavily relied.

Even so, Mockingbird fails to offer as nuanced a portrait of Lee as one would hope for or to cast much literary insight on To Kill a Mockingbird. In the absence of reliable data from which to forge a coherent narrative, Shields follows his research down many a cul de sac and pads out trivial details (a whole page is dedicated to the movies that were nominated for various Oscars in 1962) while giving short shrift to complicated questions: Is To Kill a Mockingbird a great novel or a sentimental, didactic one? Was Lee really a brilliant writer or an average one who, with great diligence and the support system of a talented editor and agent, was able to shape a highly autobiographical story that hit a cultural nerve in the years leading up to the civil rights movement?

Readers who love To Kill a Mockingbird will want to read this book for its tidbits of engaging info. But in the end, this is less a rigorous biography than a pleasant evocation of how one fiercely private woman was perceived by those around her. As such, it reminds us that a biography is, always, a fiction in its own right.

Reviewed by Meghan O'Rourke
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

A Good Read
I enjoyed the book and would suggest it for others if you are interested in Harper Lee.
It seemed to start strong, drag a little go through a furious pace with the publication of "To Kill A Mockingbird" then slow down again.
Ms. Lee is a fascinating and of course reclusive person at least as far as the press and any attempts at interviews so Mr. Shields has done a great job in piecing together a biography without the cooperation of the subject.
If you love the book and the movie you will enjoy this biography.

An Excellent Substitute
As a result of Shields's biography of Lee, those of us with interest in her can know much more about her background, her challenges, and her successes than we did before. My respect for her has been enhanced considerably by reading this book. It's the next best thing to Lee's own memoirs, which perhaps will yet appear.

For some time I resisted acquiring and reading this volume, bothered because it was described as unauthorized by its subject. Now, after reading it, I am very grateful to its author for the thoughtful and careful effort that went into it. It is generally quite sympathetic to its subject, and I would surmise that any passages which might offend her are few and far between.

In one quote attributed to a sorority member at the University of Alabama during Lee's years there, Lee is described as someone who would today be called a nerd. This nerd reader was delighted to see her so classified.

A minor annoyance with the book has to do with several geographical errors, errors which should have been detected and corrected by careful editing. Their survival in print reduces somewhat the reader's confidence in the overall accuracy of the book. An example is the reference to Evergreen's location as west of Monroeville, when it is actually to the east.

Nelle, this book's for you
Could those of us who have read and enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird harbor anything other than love and respect for Nelle Harper Lee?

Truthfully, yes, we could and we do. Many of us harbor (in addition to love and respect for her) a deep curiosity about her life. But how to satisfy that curiosity while maintaining a loving and respectful distance from this most private of authors? Charles J. Shields has solved this problem for us by creating a carefully researched, loving, respectful, and thoughtfully presented biography of Lee.

The longest chapter in the biography is about Lee's contributions to the research for Truman Capote's best-selling "non-fiction novel," In Cold Blood. Capote, of course, was Lee's neighbor and friend when the two of them were growing up in Monroeville, Alabama, the tiny community that served as the model for fictional Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird. Capote figures prominently throughout the biography, especially in the chapters about Lee's childhood.

The primary focus of the biography is Lee's long years of work on To Kill a Mockingbird and her subsequent realization that she would never publish another novel. To help us see those years in perspective, Shields provides extensive background on Lee's immediate family, her forebears, and her experiences coming to maturity in depression-era, small-town Alabama. He also describes her college and law school careers (she never graduated), and he quotes extensively from sorority sisters and others who matriculated with her.

The book draws on an astonishing variety of sources, ranging from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation detectives that Lee met while working with Capote on In Cold Blood to a student who hand-carried the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird back to Lee after Lee's former high school English teacher lightly marked It up with editorial comments for Lee's consideration. The portrait of Lee that emerges shows her to be kind, generous, independent of spirit, and deeply loved and respected by those who know her.