To Capture a Mockingbird
Charles Shields has written a fair-minded biography of novelist Harper Lee—even without talking to his subject
by Lacey Galbraith
by Lacey Galbraith
Harper Lee’s goal of making it as writer in New York City looked more like a fairy tale than an attainable dream. Already past 30, she was a college dropout still working at low-wage jobs and living in a cold-water flat near the East River. Nothing suggested she had a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in her, much less To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the best-selling American novels of all time. But in Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Henry Holt, 344 pp., $15), biographer Charles J. Shields describes a precocious child who grew into a woman known for her lively wit and natural self-confidence—someone not at all unlikely to write a book for the ages.
But that sense of self is probably why Lee, famously media shy, “declined with vigor” Shields’ attempts to solicit her input. Still, her silence makes Mockingbird even more impressive. Never sensational, the book is a fair and endearing rendering of Lee based on “six hundred interviews and other sorts of communication with Harper Lee’s friends, associates and former classmates,” as well as access to the papers of both Truman Capote and Lee’s literary agent, and years of library research. Thorough to say the least, Shields traces Lee’s childhood years, her friendship with Capote (especially her work with him on In Cold Blood), the frenzied period following the release of the novel and its film version, and her close and sometimes complicated relationship with her family.
Harper Lee struggled to find the time and means to write, and in addition to talent and perseverance, it was a mixture of friendships and fortuitous circumstance that helped her to succeed. When she was writing To Kill a Mockingbird, close friends gave her a Christmas gift of enough money to live on for a year, and both her agent and editor nurtured her through the daunting task of completing the novel. As for why she never wrote another book, Shields notes that Lee “was lucky enough to have captured many of the things she most wanted to replicate her first time out. Many writers have done much less after many books. Maybe she was, in some sense, satisfied. Maybe her deed was done.”
Charles Shields will read from his book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on May 2 at 6 p.m.
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