Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

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  Notes

  Prologue

  “Whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”: Harper Lee, “Christmas to Me,” McCall’s, December 1961; Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1961; Charles Shields, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, From Scout to Go Set a Watchman (New York: Henry Holt, 2016), 73–78.

  Friends had shown her: Lee, “Christmas to Me.”

  With the title “Go Set a Watchman.”: “Lee, Nelle Harper,” Author Cardfile, Box 210, Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Hereinafter cited as Lee, Author Cardfile, ALWP.

  Later explain to a reporter: Birmingham Post-Herald, January 3, 1962.

  Author of Gone with the Wind: Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley Jr., Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood (Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishers, 2011), 12–25.

  Help with her next book: Maurice Crain to Lois Cole, February 28, 1957; Lois Dwight Cole to Maurice Crain, April 5, 1957; Maurice Crain to Nelle Harper Lee, April 5, 1957, HarperCollins Collection. This collection consists of letters and other documents taken primarily from the files of HarperCollins. It was assembled on behalf of Jonathan Burnham, senior vice-president and publisher of HarperCollins, in preparation for the publication of Go Set a Watchman. I was allowed to read all of the material, and given permission to quote from all but one letter. The documents remain in the possession of HarperCollins. I learned of their existence after watching the video recording of “Re-Discovering Harper Lee: Jonathan Burnham in Conversation with Joan Acocella and Tuzyline Allan,” which took place October 7, 2015, at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY. In his presentation, Burnham quotes from a number of the documents from the collection. See https://www.centerforthehumanities.org/programming/re-discovering-harper-lee-jonathan-burnham-in-conversation-with-joan-acocella-and-tuzyline-allan.

  “In the segregation battle.”: Maurice Crain to Evan Thomas, April 10, 1957, HarperCollins Collection.

  this one didn’t sell: Interoffice Memorandum, Annie Laurie Williams to Maurice Crain, May 13, 1957, HarperCollins Collection.

  At J. B. Lippincott on May 13: Maurice Crain to Lynn Carrick, May 13, 1957, HarperCollins Collection.

  First fifty pages of “Watchman.”: Lee, Author Cardfile, ALWP.

  Titled “The Long Goodbye.”: Lee, Author Cardfile, ALWP.

  “Sister to a lonely childhood.”: Maurice Crain to Lynn Carrick, June 13, 1957, HarperCollins Collection.

  Flow into “Watchman.”: Nelle Harper Lee to Joy and Michael Brown, July 9, 1957, HarperCollins Collection.

  “Charm to the telling.”: Portions of Crain’s letter to McMillion are reproduced in Ari N. Schulman, “The Man Who Helped Make Harper Lee,” Atlantic, July 14, 2015. McMillion’s book, So Long at the Fair, would not be published until 1964. Writing to McMillion in February 1961, when Mockingbird had already emerged as a commercial hit, Crain recalled proudly how he “handled it from the time it was a short story and a gleam in the author’s eye.”

  Lippincott’s records as “Atticus.”: J. B. Lippincott Company, The Author and His Audience (Philadelphia, PA, 1967), 27–28.

  Pages throughout the summer: Lee, Author Cardfile, ALWP.

  Typed “To Kill A Mocking Bird.”: Lee, Author Cardfile, ALWP. Since the publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2015, the working assumption has been that Mockingbird emerged out of wholesale revisions that Lee made to Watchman under the guidance of Tay Hohoff. This is the theory put forth in Charles Shields’s biography of Lee, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, from Scout to Go Set a Watchman. Yet documents in the HarperCollins Collection, make clear that the two manuscripts emerged in succession in the first half of 1957, and that Lee imagined them as part of one continual story.

  “Pure and simple.”: Quoted in Shields, Mockingbird, 150.

  “And walk around in it.”: New York Times, January 10, 2017.

 
Chapter 1

  Was the highest he completed: Year: 1940; Census Place: Monroeville, Monroe, Alabama; Roll: T627_66; Page: 10A; Enumeration District: 50-4.

  Army of northern Virginia: Ed Conner, email to author, March 6, 2017, Joseph Crespino papers, Rose Library, Emory University (hereinafter cited as Crespino papers); Wayne Flynt, Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 124.

  “Defenceless people imaginable.”: Albert James Pickett, History of Alabama and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi from the Earliest Period (Charleston, SC: Walker and James, 1851), 521.

  Markers in and around Monroe: Hank Conner, interview by author, March 3, 2017, Crespino papers.

  Junior of her closest sibling: Monroe Journal, June 10, 1954.

  Bought on Alabama Avenue: Monroe Journal, October 5, 1922; Shields, Mockingbird, 20.

  Fully to the service: Monroe County Heritage Museum, Monroeville: The Search for Harper Lee’s Maycomb (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 1999), 76.

  Size of the tax: Anniston Star, August 17, 1932.

  Solely on a cash basis: Monroe Journal, September 12, 1935.

  That year’s legislative session: Anniston Star, February 22, 1935.

  Never came to pass: Flynt, Mockingbird Songs, 43.

  “Lucrative position recently.”: Monroe Journal, April 20, 1933. Also see Monroe Journal, January 12, 1933, and February 9, 1933.

  “Calling us names.”: Monroe Journal, June 21, 1934.

  Anything in her book: Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (New York: Warner Books, 1982), 116. All page numbers cited refer to this edition of the book; hereinafter cited as TKM.

  “Pride the name Alabamians.”: Monroe Journal, August 28, 1930.

  Against a white woman: For more on the history of prosecutions of black-on-white rape trials in the Jim Crow South, see Lisa Lindquist Dorr, White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

  A. C. Lee ever took: Shields, Mockingbird, 94–96.

  “Practice of criminal law.”: Lee, TKM, 5.

  “A Truly Great Man Passes.”: See for example Monroe Journal, April 14, 1932; December 21, 1933; May 17, 1934; and October 2, 1941.