The Lippincott editors were impressed with the skill Lee displayed in what she was then calling Go Set a Watchman-we will return to that title, and that draft, a bit later-but told her that there was still a lot of work needed. Lee made good use of that time, and delivered the first draft of a novel to Lippincott Publishers in late 1957. Lee’s friends pooled their resources to give her an extraordinary Christmas gift-a year’s wages so that she would have uninterrupted time for writing. By 1956, she had enough material to show to a literary agent, who encouraged her to continue writing, and suggested that there might be a novel somewhere in the pieces she’d already written. She studied law at the University of Alabama, then moved to New York in 1950, where she began writing essays and stories about her childhood in Monroeville. Lee was born in 1926, and grew up in Monroeville, Alabama.

The novel was an instant success, and quickly became a standard of American literature. Endnotes, an index, and an extensive bibliography are included.Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird was published on July 11, 1960. Readers will come away with the sense not only that they know the writer of the popular novel, but also that she is someone they would quite like, despite her often gruff handling of press and autograph hounds. At various points in her life, Lee emerges as a rough-and-tumble girl who staunchly defended those weaker than herself, a strong woman who defied conventional gender mores in a time and place where they mattered enormously, a loving daughter who managed to immortalize her father through the character of Atticus Finch, and a loyal friend who was willing to support Capote’s more fragile ego rather than assert her own. The first two chapters are as much about her childhood neighbor Truman Capote as they are about Lee herself, and Shields continues to trace the vicissitudes of their relationship until Capote’s death, spending a lot of time documenting the way she helped him research and edit In Cold Blood, only to have him virtually discount her efforts. Despite the daunting task of writing about a person who refuses interviews, Shields does a masterful job of painting a vivid portrait of her life and the contexts for her writing in this adaptation of his adult biography Mockingbird, employing lively prose and offering entertaining anecdotes of Lee’s childhood in a Southern town in the 1930s, her college days when she chose writing over law, and the importance of her literary circle of friends in New York. The forthright, plainspoken Nelle Harper Lee was staggered by the success of her first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, so much so that she eventually began to retreat from all media attention and requests for interviews, preferring a quiet life lived between her childhood home in Monroeville, Alabama, and her modest apartment in New York City.

I Am Scout by Charles J. Shields