Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. Then came 55 years of silence.

Journalist Casey Cep in her book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (2019) writes that the writer George Malko, her neighbour, was accustomed to a despairing Lee knocking on his door late at night. “I just threw three hundred pages of a manuscript down the incinerator,” she would say, explaining her need for an alcoholic beverage.

Lee had always been impulsive and exacting when it came to her writing. The story of Lee chucking the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird out the window and into the snow before calling her editor Therese von Hohoff Torrey (of the American publishing house JB Lippincott) in tears is part of publishing lore. Luckily, Torrey was able to persuade her to collect the pages.

Her sister Alice Finch Lee, Cep writes in her book, had told people for a time that a manuscript had been stolen from Lee’s apartment, but, the absence of the next masterpiece was largely down too Lee drinking and destroying what she worked on.

While she took on many projects, she did not publish anything for the next 55 years–and when a “forgotten” manuscript held in the family’s safety-deposit box and fished out by her lawyer was finally published seven months before her death on February 19, 2016–it was unclear whether 89-year-old Lee, who had been experiencing dementia following a stroke in 2007, had truly been of sound mind when she greenlit the publication of Go Set a Watchman.

Draft or sequel?

The publisher HarperCollins marketed the newly discovered manuscript as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. Scholars, however, said it was an earlier draft. Readers, however, were shocked to be confronted by a radically different Atticus Finch, who in Lee’s Pulitzer-winning book was a moral hero, but in Go Set a Watchman expresses segregationist views.

Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee. (Generated using AI)

Three Polish digital humanities scholars—Michał Choiński, Maciej Eder, and Jan Rybicki—who used statistical analysis of word patterns to identify authorial fingerprints (stylometric analysis), published their findings in the Mississippi Quarterly (2017). They concluded that Go Set a Watchman “was not a sequel, but the initial version of Lee’s debut book, whose plot is set later in the timeline than To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Therese Nunn, Hohoff’s granddaughter, told the Daily Telegraph she had doubts about the edition: “I would ask whether an editor had seen this, because a lot of work went into the original. I believe a good editor is indispensable.” Given the three years of intensive revision that had produced Mockingbird, she added, her grandmother would have said: “We need an editor!”

Truman Capote and true crime

A photograph of Harper Lee clicked by Truman Capote. (Wikimedia Commons)

In the mid-1970s, she seemed to have found her muse once again, so much so that she told the actor Gregory Peck, who had won an Oscar playing Atticus Finch, that she would have another part for him soon.

This time, Lee was on the trail of a true crime story featuring a rural Alabama preacher, Reverend Willie Maxwell, who was suspected of killing at least five family members and each time drawing a handsome insurance payout. While it could not be conclusively proved that he was responsible for the deaths, he was shot down by one Robert Burns at his stepdaughter’s funeral.

Lee, who was born in Monroeville, Alabama in 1926, had grown up next door to Truman Capote, the author of the bestseller In Cold Blood (1966) that was based on the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Kansas.

Their relationship extended into adulthood and into their professional work so much so that Lee helped him with his research for In Cold Blood, producing at least 150 pages of notes, but the relationship curdled after she felt slighted about only being mentioned in the acknowledgements. To add insult to injury, rumours circulated that Capote had played a role in writing To Kill a Mockingbird itself. Those rumours have since been put to rest. The same stylometric analysis by Choiński, Eder, and Rybicki found “no sign that someone else really authored Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller.”

Lee addresses the falling-out with Capote directly in a letter to her friend, the Alabama historian Wayne Flynt, reproduced in Flynt’s memoir Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee (2017). “Oh well,” she wrote, “it all comes down to one thing: I was his oldest friend and I did something Truman could not forgive: I wrote a novel that sold. (Never mind its content—I doubt that he ever understood what was in it.) Not only sold but was still selling in his last years. He nursed his envy for more than 20 years.”

This was her chance to do a better job than Capote. She had never said so publicly, but in letters to Sandy Campbell, who had fact-checked the New Yorker serialisation of Capote’s book, she said: “Truman’s having long ago put fact out of business had made me despair of ‘factual’ accounts of anything.”

She conducted several interviews and worked on it for nearly a decade, but then the same thing happened. In a letter to Peck in 1981, she described the position she was in: “nobody cared when I was writing” Mockingbird, “but now it seems that my neck is being breathed on.” Her agent wanted “pure gore & autopsies,” and her publisher wanted another bestseller.

What did she want? Only “a clear conscience, in that I haven’t defrauded the reader.”

Tom Radney, the lawyer at the centre of the story, eventually told a reporter: “I think she’s fighting a battle between the book and a bottle of scotch. And the scotch is winning.”

When Radney died and his family went through his files, they found a briefcase that had been in Lee’s possession until her death. It held trial transcripts, insurance documents, a catalogue from an occult bookstore, and her reporter’s tape recorder. The tape recorder’s warranty card was still folded inside it. Sadly, only four pages of “The Reverend” were ever found.

What happened to Harper Lee?

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. (Generated using AI)

So why was there no second book? “I’m a slow worker,” she told Newquist. “I don’t write very fast.” In a letter to Flynt, she referred to herself as “a one-novel wonder.” The evidence left behind by Lee herself in interviews and letters suggests several overlapping answers.

The most common hypothesis is perfectionism sharpened into paralysis by fame. Lee was a slow, exacting writer before To Kill a Mockingbird; afterwards, each sentence had to contend with the weight of a Pulitzer. In a letter to Flynt she described reading a biography of Eudora Welty — “my goddess” — while managing only two inches of vision, her macular degeneration already stripping away the world she had spent a lifetime observing. By the time of her stroke in 2007, she was nearly blind.

A second hypothesis concerns her drinking habit. Perhaps, as Radney put it, the scotch was winning.

A third hypothesis, advanced by scholar Jennifer Murray in the Southern Literary Journal, is that Lee was primarily a short story writer who had been pressured by the market into producing a novel, and that novel’s success locked her permanently into a form she had never found natural. But Lee herself, in a letter to Flynt from August 2006, pushed back against this reading: “TKAM was not formed by ‘a series of short stories,'” she wrote. “It grew out of one short story.” Whatever her troubles with the novel form, she did not experience herself as its hostage.

A fourth hypothesis is that Tay Hohoff, the editor who had once told Lee to go outside and collect every page from the snow, passed away in 1974. From that point on, there was no one to tell her that the manuscript she was throwing away was worth saving.

A final hypothesis belongs to Lee herself. When Flynt visited her at her assisted living facility on February 9, 2015, six days after HarperCollins announced Go Set a Watchman, he told her it was the most important story in American literature in half a century. “With sagging shoulders and eyes focused on her feet,” Flynt writes, “she muttered softly, almost inaudibly, ‘I’m not so sure anymore.'”

It is unclear what she meant. Perhaps she meant she was not sure the book deserved the attention, or that she was not sure it should have been published. She had, in a letter to a friend many years earlier, already offered the most honest answer of all: “Harper Lee thrives, but at the expense of Nelle”–her given first name, and the one her friends and family used.

References 

Begley, Sarah. “The Legendary Friendship of Harper Lee and Truman Capote.” Time, Feb. 20, 2016. time.com/4230925/harper-lee-truman-capote-friendship.

Cep, Casey N. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.
Choiński, Michał, Maciej Eder and Jan Rybicki. “Harper Lee and Other People: A Stylometric Diagnosis.” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 70/71, no. 3, 2017, pp. 355-374.

Flynt, Wayne. Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee. HarperCollins, 2017.
Lee, Harper. Interview by Roy Newquist. Counterpoint. WQXR, New York, 1964.

Mahler, Jonathan. “The Invisible Hand Behind Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ ” The New York Times, July 12, 2015. nytimes.com/2015/07/13/books/the-invisible-hand-behind-harper-lees-to-kill-a-mockingbird.html.

Murray, Jennifer. “More Than One Way to (Mis)Read a Mockingbird.” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, Fall 2010, pp. 75-91.

Nunn, Therese. Interview. The Daily Telegraph, July 14, 2015.