Monroeville is set on a square with a courthouse in the middle. That is where Harper Lee has said that she, as Scout did in the novel, spent time in the balcony watching her own lawyer father, Amasa Coleman Lee (often called A.C.) at work. “Few people live to be 80 years old and then have their name changed,” the Journal reported, “that is what has happened to a prominent Monroeville attorney. A. C. Lee is now being called Atticus Finch.” Finch was the maiden name of A.C.’s wife and Harper Lee’s mother, Frances.
Harper Lee poses for Life magazine in the balcony of the old courthouse in Monroeville, Alabama, May 1961.
Courtesy of Donald Uhrbrock/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
In 1961, when she was photographed in the balcony of the Monroe County Courthouse by Life, Lee told the magazine, “The trial was a composite of all the trials in the world—some in the South. But the courthouse was this one. My father was a lawyer, so I grew up in this room and mostly watched him from here. My father is one of the few men I’ve known with genuine humility, and it lends him a natural dignity. He has absolutely no ego drive, and so he was one of the most beloved men in this part of the state.”
While Nelle Harper Lee was growing up, her lawyer father also was a state legislator (1926–1938) and the editor of the Monroe Journal (1929–1947). This was the Deep South, where cotton was plentiful and sharecropping the norm. Monroeville was a farming community, hard-hit during the Depression. The Hoover carts of Maycomb—mules or oxen hitched to a car because gasoline was unaffordable—were on the real-life streets of Monroeville.
The Monroe Journal of the thirties includes reports of a black man accused of raping a white woman, rabid-dog warnings, and ads for V. J. Elmore’s, the variety store where Jem buys Scout her sequined baton in the novel. Monroeville residents remember a boy who lived in a ramshackle house near the school who was not allowed out after a run-in with the law and a schoolyard rumor that the pecans from the trees at that house were poisoned, as was said of Boo Radley’s house. And a girl dressed up as a ham for an agricultural pageant as Scout did for the Halloween play.
Connecting real people, places, and events to those in the novel is a favorite pastime for residents. It fuels tourism. The old courthouse where A. C. Lee once worked is now the Monroe County Heritage Museum, a monument to To Kill a Mockingbird and the town it comes from. One room is set aside for Truman Capote, the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, who was raised mainly in Monroeville by his mother’s relatives until he was nine. In a display case is Capote’s baby blanket and a colorful coat worn by an aunt. The museum gets twenty thousand visitors a year, says its director, Jane Ellen Clark. “We just try to answer their questions about the book, and about the town. Because everybody wants to know what was real and what wasn’t. Everything that I see or hear in the book I can relate to something [in Monroeville]. I do think that she was talking about her town, and her family, and all the people that she knew here.”
The former courthouse, now the Monroe County Heritage Museum.
Courtesy of Monroe County Heritage Museum.
MISS ALICE REMEMBERS
The novelist’s older sister Alice Finch Lee sees it differently. “Nelle Harper says that everybody around Monroeville was determined to see themselves in the book. They would come up to her and say, ‘I’m so and so in the book.’ But we learned that wherever they were, they placed the book setting where they lived. Early on, Nelle Harper got a letter from a young woman in Chicago who was a doctor, and she said, ‘I’m interested to know when you spent so much time in Greensboro.’ Now, the only time Nelle Harper ever been to Greensboro was when she passed through it to go to school.”
Amasa Coleman Lee, Harper Lee’s father.
Courtesy of Monroe County Heritage Museum.
Frances Finch Lee, Harper Lee’s mother.
Courtesy of Monroe County Heritage Museum.
At the age of ninety-eight, Alice Finch Lee can still be found at her desk every day at Barrett, Bugg and Lee, the Monroeville law firm where her father worked. Alice Lee handles real estate transfers and titles when not politely declining interview requests of her sister or sorting through the boxes of fan mail.
“Everyone tries to make it an autobiography or a biography or a true story,” she said to me a bit wearily. Unlike the fictional Finches, “we had a mother, we loved both parents.” Frances Finch Lee, a talented musician, lived until 1951. Nelle Harper was twenty-five and Alice forty when she died.
Alice Lee described her sister as a tomboy and a gifted storyteller who had a vivid imagination all her life. “At home we were pretty much allowed to go in the direction we wanted to go, unless we were headed the wrong way. But we knew we were expected to go to Sunday school and church on Sunday, which we did. We knew we had to go to school through the week. But we were pretty much left on our resources for entertainment. Nelle Harper was very athletic. She liked to play with the little boys more than the little girls because she liked to play ball.”
NELLE AND TRUMAN; SCOUT AND DILL
One of those little boys lived next door to the Lees: Truman Streckfus Persons, who later took his stepfather’s name and became Truman Capote. In the novel, Dill Harris lives with his aunt Rachel next door to the Finches; he is the only character that Harper Lee has acknowledged had a model from real life. Capote based Idabel Tompkins, a character in Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) on Lee. In Capote’s novel, Idabel says, “Hell, I’ve fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I’m a girl, you’ve got to remember that or we can never be friends.” That these childhood playmates from a tiny town, who once shared a beat-up old Underwood typewriter Mr. Lee brought home from the newspaper, would go on to write American classics both captures and boggles the imagination.
Young Truman Capote with his aunt in Monroeville, Alabama.
Courtesy of Monroe County Heritage Museum.
In 1959, when To Kill a Mockingbird was finished but not yet published, Lee went to Holcomb, Kansas, to work on what Capote called his nonfiction novel, about the murder of a farm family. Those reporting trips became the subject of two movies Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006), and twined the two together in popular culture. By the time the movies about him appeared, Capote had been dead for more than twenty years. Lee was nearly eighty.
The childhood friendship would not survive. According to Alice Lee, Capote’s envy over To Kill a Mockingbird winning the Pulitzer Prize consumed him. “Truman became very jealous because Nelle Harper got a Pulitzer and he did not. He expected In Cold Blood to bring him one, and he got involved with the drugs and heavy drinking and all. And that was it. It was not Nelle Harper dropping him. It was Truman going away from her.”
In time, a persistent and untraceable rumor developed, largely fueled by the fact that Lee did not publish a second book, which suggested Capote had something to do with the writing of To Kill a Mockingbird. Many of the writers I interviewed rejected this notion based on style alone. Mark Childress said, “I got a letter from Harper Lee one time that absolutely proved to me that she wrote every word of To Kill a Mockingbird ’cause the voice is completely the voice of the book. It’s the most beautifully, eloquently written letter. So I know that people are lying when they say that.”
Anna Quindlan said, “Truman Capote would have ginned up all kinds of scenes in that book. You know, just by reading To Kill a Mockingbird, that Harper Lee, who is obviously Scout, is a person with a grounded self-esteem, surrounded by affection. Whereas you have that horrible moment where her hideous second cousin Francis, the one that she beats up and calls a whore lady with no idea what that means, says something terrible about Dill, who is based on the boy Truman Capote. He says, ‘[Dill] doesn’t come to visit you in the summer. His mother doesn’t want him and she passes him around from person to person’ and you think, oh that little boy is going to be in real trouble and, of course, that little boy was.”
WHEN A THING LIKE THIS HAPPENS TO A COUNTRY GIRL GOING TO
NEW YORK
“It was somewhat of a surprise and it’s very rare indeed when a thing like this happens to a country girl going to New York,” A. C. Lee told his local paper in 1960.
Very rare indeed. Nelle Harper left the University of Alabama in 1948, one semester short of completing her law studies, and moved to New York to pursue writing. She supported herself as an airline ticket agent until friends, Michael and Joy Brown, gave her an unusual present on Christmas Day, 1956: the money to quit her job and write full-time for one year. “Their ‘faith in me’ was really all I heard them say,” Lee wrote later, in a 1964 essay for McCall’s magazine. “I would do my best not to fail them.”
And so she did. By June 1957, Nelle Harper Lee had an agent and a manuscript, titled “Atticus,” that was submitted to the publisher J. B. Lippincott Company. “There were many things wrong about it,” editor Tay Hohoff later recalled. “It was more of a collection of short stories than a true novel. And—and yet, there was also life. It was real. The people walked solidly onto the pages; they could be seen and felt…. Obviously a keen and witty and even wise mind was at work; but was it the mind of a professional novelist? There were dangling threads of a plot, there was a lack of unity—a beginning, a middle, and an end—that was inherent in the beginning. It is an indication of how seriously we were impressed by the author that we signed a contract at that point.” Hohoff described the prepublication life of the novel in “We Get a New Author,” an essay for the Literary Guild’s magazine to promote the selection of To Kill a Mockingbird as its book of the month.
Advertisement for To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960.
After the book contract was signed, two more years of work followed—“a long and hopeless period of writing the book over and over again” is how Lee described it to the New York Times in 1961—though there is no record to be found of the edits that were made to the manuscript. The Christmas gift from her good friends and a small advance from her publisher could only stretch so far. “It’s no secret,” Hohoff wrote in 1967, “that she was living on next to nothing and in considerable physical discomfort while she was writing Mockingbird. I don’t think anyone, certainly not I, ever heard one small mutter of discontent throughout all those months of writing and tearing up, writing and tearing up.”
The end result was a triumph. Even before its official publication date, To Kill a Mockingbird had begun to soar. It was chosen for the Literary Guild and to be condensed for the Reader’s Digest Book Club. “Harper Lee’s first novel sets the whole book world on fire! The reason: It makes you so glad to be alive,” blared the publisher’s ad for the $3.95 hardcover. “Weeks before publication the book world was talking about To Kill a Mockingbird. The grapevine began humming with excitement. Booksellers heard it and increased their advance orders.”
SUMMER OF ’60
To Kill a Mockingbird was published on July 11, 1960. It was the summer the birth-control pill was released, Elvis Presley returned to civilian life and recorded “It’s Now or Never,” some seven hundred U.S. military advisers were in South Vietnam, Psycho was in movie theaters, Gunsmoke was on TV, the Kennedy-Nixon campaign was just beginning, Wilma Rudolph won three gold medals at the summer Olympics in Rome, and Alan Drury’s Advise and Consent, a novel about a secretary-of-state nominee who once had ties to the Communist Party, was at the top of the bestselling fiction list. Better Homes and Gardens First Aid for Your Family was moving quickly to the top of the nonfiction list.
That summer, most forms of racial segregation were not yet against the law, and civil disobedience, such as sit-ins at lunch counters, had only just begun. “People forget how divided this country was,” Scott Turow said, “what the animosity was to the Civil Rights Act, which probably never would have been passed if John F. Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated, and it became his legacy. But that was 1963. In 1960 there were no laws guaranteeing that African Americans could enter any restaurant, any hotel. We didn’t have those laws. In that world, [for Harper Lee] to speak out this way was remarkable.”
In Alabama only sixty-six thousand of the state’s nearly one million blacks were registered to vote. Three years later, in his 1963 inauguration speech, Governor George Wallace vowed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” Six months after his inauguration, Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door refusing to integrate the University of Alabama.
In Birmingham, where the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four young girls would become a turning point in the civil rights movement, Andrew Young was working on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s campaign to desegregate the downtown businesses. “You had, for the first time, black people making union wages in the steel mills,” he remembered. “And they began to build nice homes. These were veterans of service in the military who came back, went to school, got good jobs, and started building nice little homes, nothing fancy, just little three-bedroom frame houses. There were more than sixty of those houses dynamited [by whites in the late fifties]. To Kill a Mockingbird gave us the background to that, but it also gave us hope that justice could prevail. I think that’s one of the things that makes it a great story, because it can be repeated in many different ways.”
Childress recalled the story of how Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in 1862. President Lincoln reportedly said, “So this is the little lady who started our big war.” Childress said, “I think the same can be said of Harper Lee. This was one of the most influential novels, not necessarily in a literary sense, but in a social sense. It gives white Southerners a way to understand the racism that they’ve been brought up with and to find another way. And for white Southerners at that time, there was no other way. And most white people in the South were good people. Most white people in the South were not throwing bombs and causing havoc. But they had been raised in the system, and I think the book really helped them come to understand what was wrong with the system in the way that any number of treatises could never do, because it was popular art, because it was told from a child’s point of view.”
Rick Bragg saw the novel’s impact on whites, on “young men who grew up on the wrong side of the issue that dominates this book. They start reading it, and the next thing you know, it’s not just held their interest, it’s changed their views. That’s almost impossible. But it happens.”
One of the reasons it can happen, McWhorter suggested, is that “even though To Kill a Mockingbird is such a classic indictment of racism, it’s not really an indictment of the racist, because there’s this recognition that those attitudes were ‘normal’ then. For someone to rebel and stand up against them was exceptional, and Atticus doesn’t take that much pride in doing so, just as he would have preferred not to have to be the one to shoot the mad dog. He simply does what he must do and doesn’t make a big deal about it.”
HOLLYWOOD
“The big danger in making a movie of To Kill a Mockingbird,” its director, Robert Mulligan, said to the New York Times in 1961, “is in thinking of this as a chance to jump on a segregation-integration soapbox. This book does not make speeches. It is not melodramatic, with race riots and race hatred. It deals with bigotry, lack of understanding, and rigid social patterns of a small Southern town.” Mulligan and producer Alan Pakula first approached Harper Lee to write the screenplay. She declined, wanting to work instead on her next book. Texas playwright Horton Foote wrote what many consider to be one of the greatest screen adaptations of all time. The script, faithful to the novel, condensed the time period from three years to one, deleted many characters, and focused heavily on the mystery of Boo Radley and the trial of Tom Robinson.
“Horton Foote was the perfect person to adapt Harper Lee’s book,” said theatrical agent Boaty Boatwright, who cast the children in the movie. “He was a poet and he understood those people and he wrote so beautifully. She and Horton became the closest and the best of friends and stayed completely in touch until [Foote died in 2009]
. There are many great books that don’t make great films. And sometimes there are rather bad books that make good films. But this was a real combination. Harper loved what he did; we all did.”
To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and featuring Robert Duvall’s wordless screen debut as Boo Radley, was released on Christmas Day, 1962. The opening credit sequence—with Steven Frankfurt’s design of marbles, toys, and crayon drawings and composer Elmer Bernstein’s plaintive piano notes, just the way a child would play them—stands alone.
Young Mary Badham makes a perfect Scout entrance swinging into frame on a Tarzan rope tied to a tree and dropping down. The casting was “pure genius,” wrote Leo Sullivan in the Washington Post, calling the film “an unforgettable beautiful experience.” Bosley Crowther in the New York Times also noted the “superb discoveries” of Badham and Phillip Alford, who played Jem.
“I know authors are supposed to knock Hollywood and complain about how their works are treated,” Harper Lee told Bob Thomas of the Associated Press, “but I just can’t manage it.”
In Birmingham, McWhorter was in the fifth grade at the private, all-white Brooke Hill School for Girls with Mary Badham, who, at age nine, with no acting experience, got the part of Scout in the movie. The entire class watched it together. “Every Southern child has an episode of cognitive dissonance having to do with race, and it’s when the beliefs that you held are suddenly contradicted. For me, it was seeing that movie. I remember watching it, first assuming that Atticus was going to get Tom Robinson off because Tom Robinson was innocent, and Atticus was played by Gregory Peck, and of course he’s going to win. Then, as it dawned on me that it wasn’t going to happen, I started getting upset about that. Then I started getting really upset about being upset. By rooting for a black man, you are kind of betraying every principle that you had been raised to believe. And I remember thinking, What would my father think, if he saw me fighting back these tears when Tom Robinson gets shot? It was a really disturbing experience. Crying tears for a black man was so taboo.”
Scout, Atticus, & Boo Page 3