Remembering Harper Lee

Today is the birthday of Nelle Harper Lee (April 28,1926 - Februrary 19, 2017) of Monroeville, Alabama, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. In honor of this anniversary, I am re-posting this essay from 2017.  ~ CK

Harper Lee and the Hero's Journey

[The following essay is not a review of Go Set a Watchmen but rather it is my take on how Harper Lee's own journey was similar to what Joseph Campbell described as the archetypal hero's journey. It was first published on July 17, 2015 at AMERICAblog and is re-printed here because it is always good to remember Nelle Harper Lee and her lasting contribution to literature and to the world. ~ CK]

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in the screen version of TKAM

There has been an abundance of talk this week about Atticus Finch, the fictional character in To Kill a Mockingbird.  The release of Harper Lee’s earlier novel, Go Set a Watchman has created quite a buzz. Go Set a Watchman was Lee’s first submission which the publisher’s rejected and encouraged her to go back and rewrite, focusing on young Scout’s point of view. The publishing of that first draft has not been without controversy. The buzz now that it has been released is all about the portrayal of Atticus Finch as a racist. He looked upon blacks as though they were children, not yet ready for the full equality of citizenship. He was even a member of the White Citizen’s Council and didn’t like the idea of the Supreme Court meddling in the affairs of his Southern town.

Many seem to be feeling dazed over the fact that Atticus Finch, or probably more accurately, Gregory Peck’s cinematic version of Atticus Finch, could be so much a part of the Southern racist mindset. Much will be said about the literary value of Go Set a Watchman, and much analysis will be given regarding the protagonist of both of Harper Lee’s novels in light of the new information that has now been made public. Instead of literary criticism, I would like to take a look at the literary dilemma of Watchman in light of Harper Lee’s own journey. I see it as what Joseph Campbell has called, “the hero’s journey.”

The Traveler Comes Home

In Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise (whom we knew previously as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird) is a young adult woman who has been living in New York City, and returns to her Southern hometown to be dismayed by the racism she sees in her beloved father.  It has long been noted that the gentlemanly Southern lawyer, Atticus Finch, is based upon Harper Lee’s own father who was an influential lawyer in the small southern town of Monroeville, Alabama.  In Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise’s experience is too similar to the author’s own life not to wonder about the autobiographical nature of the writing.  After all, Harper Lee had left Monroeville, Alabama to live and work in New York City.

Remember that this was the 1950s, when the South was still under Jim Crow laws, fully segregated, and resisting implementation of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The paternalistic view seen in the Atticus Finch of Go Set a Watchman is characteristic of many educated whites of the time, and a view that might have been considered “forward thinking” by fellow Southerners. The problem is that Jean Louise has seen the world and now sees her own town and townsfolk in a different light.

I am a Southerner, born and raised in a small town in Alabama, and I can speak to the effects that travel can have upon one’s perception of things back home. I first went to the big city to go to college, and then I went, not to New York, but to the San Francisco Bay Area for three and a half years. My trek was in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and I can attest to the feelings of shock and dismay when revisiting one’s hometown with a renewed vision and seeing the racist attitudes on display. Those attitudes had always been there, they were part and parcel of my own upbringing, but I could not see them clearly until having spent some significant time out of the South.

A Hero’s Vision

Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, talked about a common archetype in mythology in which the hero makes a long journey to a distant land. He is changed in the process of that journey by the things he encounters (in mythology, it is often a magical realm of unsuspected challenge and/or danger). Eventually the hero returns home with a new vision and gives hope and courage to his people based upon the transformation that his journey has wrought within him.  Psychologists tell us that these mythological archetypes are present in all of us, and that we each live out these various archetypes to some extent.  I would submit that Harper Lee made that hero’s journey and while her initial return home is reflected in Go Set a Watchman, her transformative work is seen in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Having made my own journey out and back home again, I can attest to the dismay in realizing that the people I revered and who nurtured and taught me so much, could also exhibit racist tendencies.  I cannot claim to be on a hero’s journey, but I think I understand some of the things at work in that archetypal expression.  I can see how Harper Lee would have been frustrated by the mindset of her friends back home, but since these are her loved ones, there is more than frustration.  When our travels break us free from those regional bonds and drop the scales from our eyes, so to speak, our first impulse is to demand that that everyone else “see the light” just as we have. The problem is that they have not left home; they have not been on that long transformative journey. The returning hero, as mythology points out, must then find some way to open the eyes of his people.

The Transformative Power of Story

Harper Lee found a way to open the eyes of her people and was able to craft the transformative work that would enable all of us to see ourselves in a new light. In other words, she completed the hero’s journey when she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.  She found something redemptive in that racist Southern culture that would give us all hope that things can be better than they are now.  When To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, most Southern whites were denying that there was a problem. Resistance against civil rights was widespread throughout the South. Harper Lee, however, not only gave hope to the movement for racial equality, she also showed the white people in power that there was some decency within them which meant that they did not have to be trapped in an evil racist system.  Not only was there hope for blacks to throw off the shackles of oppression, there was hope for whites to throw off their own shackles of bitter racism.

We were not there in 1960. Though we have made some progress, we are still not there in 2015. Thanks to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (which we now see came about by way of wrestling with the harsh realities of a racist culture in Go Set a Watchman) we have a transformative gift given to us by that hero with a thousand faces. Harper Lee took a hard painful look at the racist South and she found that element within our own culture that could save us from ourselves. That gift, it turns out is universal – it is not just for the South. That saving grace in the midst of injustice and oppression that we see in To Kill a Mockingbird has resonated through the years all over the world.

Many have left the South and have been changed by the experience of living somewhere else – tracing the hero’s journey. Many left never to come back and some returned. While others have come back home and tried to make a difference, only Harper Lee has returned to the South and given us something so astounding as To Kill a Mockingbird.  Rather than mourn over the clay feet of a fictional character, or fret over the awkwardness of literary first drafts, I choose to be grateful for Harper Lee and the hero’s journey that she has demonstrated to world.


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Book Review: Mockingbird Songs

  Treasures in Earthen Vessels

A Review of Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee

Reading Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee, by southern historian Wayne Flynt, is a sheer delight. There is so much of a “Southern feel” about it that it gives me a greater appreciation for my own Alabama roots. Moreover, it provides a truly endearing image of Nelle Lee both in her own written correspondence and in the author’s reflections upon their friendship. Wayne Flynt’s work will give readers a better understanding of the world of Harper Lee from which her celebrated novel arose. A lady emerges from these pages who is quintessentially southern while forever chaffing at the confines of her South Alabama hometown.

Of course, the backdrop of any discussion of Harper Lee is her influential novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Having been translated into so many languages and made required reading in schools throughout the world, Ms. Lee’s impact upon our thinking and our living is without question.

Truman Capote, Harper Lee’s cousin, makes a “cameo appearance” in Mockingbird Songs as Dr. Flynt relates some of their conversations. Those conversations reminded me of a wonderful experience I had years ago. I went to a dramatic reading of “A Christmas Memory” at the Birmingham Unitarian Church. I had seen the film production with Geraldine Page on television, but hearing his words read aloud by just a few people that Sunday morning was incredibly moving. I had known of Capote primarily as that eccentric fellow who appeared now and then on TV talk shows. That morning, however, there were tears throughout the congregation. My thought at the time was that it is remarkable that such an odd little man could make me feel so good about growing up in Alabama. Maybe that is just another way of saying with St. Paul that “we hold this treasure in earthen vessels.”

Perhaps that is part of what Atticus Finch reminded us of as well, that we hold this treasure in earthen vessels. I was glad that Wayne Flynt included in his book the eulogy he delivered for Harper Lee at her funeral, “Atticus’s Vision of Ourselves.” It had been a speech that Dr. Flynt presented in 2006 when Harper Lee was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Birmingham Pledge Foundation. She told him at the time that she wanted him to give that same speech at her funeral.  “Atticus’ Vision of Ourselves” is certainly an important word for all of us, and needed now as much as any time before.

Mockingbird Songs is a loving “filling in of the blanks” of Nelle Harper Lee’s life, which we could not otherwise have known. 

Book Details:

Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee

Author: Wayne Flint

Publisher: Harper, May 2, 2017

Hardcover 240 pages

ISBN: 0062660101
List Price: $25.99

 

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Harper Lee and the Hero's Journey

[The following essay is not a review of Go Set a Watchmen but rather it is my take on how Harper Lee's own journey was similar to what Joseph Campbell described as the archetypal hero's journey. It was first published on July 17, 2015 at AMERICAblog and is re-printed here because it is always good to remember Nelle Harper Lee and her lasting contribution to literature and to the world. ~ CK]

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in the screen version of TKAM

There has been an abundance of talk this week about Atticus Finch, the fictional character in To Kill a Mockingbird.  The release of Harper Lee’s earlier novel, Go Set a Watchman has created quite a buzz. Go Set a Watchman was Lee’s first submission which the publisher’s rejected and encouraged her to go back and rewrite, focusing on young Scout’s point of view. The publishing of that first draft has not been without controversy. The buzz now that it has been released is all about the portrayal of Atticus Finch as a racist. He looked upon blacks as though they were children, not yet ready for the full equality of citizenship. He was even a member of the White Citizen’s Council and didn’t like the idea of the Supreme Court meddling in the affairs of his Southern town.

Many seem to be feeling dazed over the fact that Atticus Finch, or probably more accurately, Gregory Peck’s cinematic version of Atticus Finch, could be so much a part of the Southern racist mindset. Much will be said about the literary value of Go Set a Watchman, and much analysis will be given regarding the protagonist of both of Harper Lee’s novels in light of the new information that has now been made public. Instead of literary criticism, I would like to take a look at the literary dilemma of Watchman in light of Harper Lee’s own journey. I see it as what Joseph Campbell has called, “the hero’s journey.”

The Traveler Comes Home

In Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise (whom we knew previously as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird) is a young adult woman who has been living in New York City, and returns to her Southern hometown to be dismayed by the racism she sees in her beloved father.  It has long been noted that the gentlemanly Southern lawyer, Atticus Finch, is based upon Harper Lee’s own father who was an influential lawyer in the small southern town of Monroeville, Alabama.  In Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise’s experience is too similar to the author’s own life not to wonder about the autobiographical nature of the writing.  After all, Harper Lee had left Monroeville, Alabama to live and work in New York City.

Remember that this was the 1950s, when the South was still under Jim Crow laws, fully segregated, and resisting implementation of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The paternalistic view seen in the Atticus Finch of Go Tell a Watchman is characteristic of many educated whites of the time, and a view that might have been considered “forward thinking” by fellow Southerners. The problem is that Jean Louise has seen the world and now sees her own town and townsfolk in a different light.

I am a Southerner, born and raised in a small town in Alabama, and I can speak to the effects that travel can have upon one’s perception of things back home. I first went to the big city to go to college, and then I went, not to New York, but to the San Francisco Bay Area for three and a half years. My trek was in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and I can attest to the feelings of shock and dismay when revisiting one’s hometown with a renewed vision and seeing the racist attitudes on display. Those attitudes had always been there, they were part and parcel of my own upbringing, but I could not see them clearly until having spent some significant time out of the South.

A Hero’s Vision

Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, talked about a common archetype in mythology in which the hero makes a long journey to a distant land. He is changed in the process of that journey by the things he encounters (in mythology, it is often a magical realm of unsuspected challenge and/or danger). Eventually the hero returns home with a new vision and gives hope and courage to his people based upon the transformation that his journey has wrought within him.  Psychologists tell us that these mythological archetypes are present in all of us, and that we each live out these various archetypes to some extent.  I would submit that Harper Lee made that hero’s journey and while her initial return home is reflected in Go Set a Watchman, her transformative work is seen in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Having made my own journey out and back home again, I can attest to the dismay in realizing that the people I revered and who nurtured and taught me so much, could also exhibit racist tendencies.  I cannot claim to be on a hero’s journey, but I think I understand some of the things at work in that archetypal expression.  I can see how Harper Lee would have been frustrated by the mindset of her friends back home, but since these are her loved ones, there is more than frustration.  When our travels break us free from those regional bonds and drop the scales from our eyes, so to speak, our first impulse is to demand that that everyone else “see the light” just as we have. The problem is that they have not left home; they have not been on that long transformative journey. The returning hero, as mythology points out, must then find some way to open the eyes of his people.

The Transformative Power of Story

Harper Lee found a way to open the eyes of her people and was able to craft the transformative work that would enable all of us to see ourselves in a new light. In other words, she completed the hero’s journey when she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.  She found something redemptive in that racist Southern culture that would give us all hope that things can be better than they are now.  When To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, most Southern whites were denying that there was a problem. Resistance against civil rights was widespread throughout the South. Harper Lee, however, not only gave hope to the movement for racial equality, she also showed the white people in power that there was some decency within them which meant that they did not have to be trapped in an evil racist system.  Not only was there hope for blacks to throw off the shackles of oppression, there was hope for whites to throw off their own shackles of bitter racism.

We were not there in 1960. Though we have made some progress, we are still not there in 2015. Thanks to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (which we now see came about by way of wrestling with the harsh realities of a racist culture in Go Set a Watchman) we have a transformative gift given to us by that hero with a thousand faces. Harper Lee took a hard painful look at the racist South and she found that element within our own culture that could save us from ourselves. That gift, it turns out is universal – it is not just for the South. That saving grace in the midst of injustice and oppression that we see in To Kill a Mockingbird has resonated through the years all over the world.

Many have left the South and have been changed by the experience of living somewhere else – tracing the hero’s journey. Many left never to come back and some returned. While others have come back home and tried to make a difference, only Harper Lee has returned to the South and given us something so astounding as To Kill a Mockingbird.  Rather than mourn over the clay feet of a fictional character, or fret over the awkwardness of literary first drafts, I choose to be grateful for Harper Lee and the hero’s journey that she has demonstrated to world.


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Harper Lee and the Hero's Journey

[Note: The following essay is not a review of Go Set a Watchmen but rather it is my take on how Harper Lee's own journey was similar to what Joseph Campbell described as the archetypal hero's journey. My essay also appeared at AMERICAblog]

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in the screen version of TKAM

There has been an abundance of talk this week about Atticus Finch, the fictional character in To Kill a Mockingbird.  The release of Harper Lee’s earlier novel, Go Set a Watchman has created quite a buzz. Go Set a Watchman was Lee’s first submission which the publisher’s rejected and encouraged her to go back and rewrite, focusing on young Scout’s point of view. The publishing of that first draft has not been without controversy. The buzz now that it has been released is all about the portrayal of Atticus Finch as a racist. He looked upon blacks as though they were children, not yet ready for the full equality of citizenship. He was even a member of the White Citizen’s Council and didn’t like the idea of the Supreme Court meddling in the affairs of his Southern town.

Many seem to be feeling dazed over the fact that Atticus Finch, or probably more accurately, Gregory Peck’s cinematic version of Atticus Finch, could be so much a part of the Southern racist mindset. Much will be said about the literary value of Go Set a Watchman, and much analysis will be given regarding the protagonist of both of Harper Lee’s novels in light of the new information that has now been made public. Instead of literary criticism, I would like to take a look at the literary dilemma of Watchman in light of Harper Lee’s own journey. I see it as what Joseph Campbell has called, “the hero’s journey.”

The Traveler Comes Home

In Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise (whom we knew previously as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird) is a young adult woman who has been living in New York City, and returns to her Southern hometown to be dismayed by the racism she sees in her beloved father.  It has long been noted that the gentlemanly Southern lawyer, Atticus Finch, is based upon Harper Lee’s own father who was an influential lawyer in the small southern town of Monroeville, Alabama.  In Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise’s experience is too similar to the author’s own life not to wonder about the autobiographical nature of the writing.  After all, Harper Lee had left Monroeville, Alabama to live and work in New York City.

Remember that this was the 1950s, when the South was still under Jim Crow laws, fully segregated, and resisting implementation of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The paternalistic view seen in the Atticus Finch of Go Tell a Watchman is characteristic of many educated whites of the time, and a view that might have been considered “forward thinking” by fellow Southerners. The problem is that Jean Louise has seen the world and now sees her own town and townsfolk in a different light.

I am a Southerner, born and raised in a small town in Alabama, and I can speak to the effects that travel can have upon one’s perception of things back home. I first went to the big city to go to college, and then I went, not to New York, but to the San Francisco Bay Area for three and a half years. My trek was in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and I can attest to the feelings of shock and dismay when revisiting one’s hometown with a renewed vision and seeing the racist attitudes on display. Those attitudes had always been there, they were part and parcel of my own upbringing, but I could not see them clearly until having spent some significant time out of the South.

A Hero’s Vision

Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, talked about a common archetype in mythology in which the hero makes a long journey to a distant land. He is changed in the process of that journey by the things he encounters (in mythology, it is often a magical realm of unsuspected challenge and/or danger). Eventually the hero returns home with a new vision and gives hope and courage to his people based upon the transformation that his journey has wrought within him.  Psychologists tell us that these mythological archetypes are present in all of us, and that we each live out these various archetypes to some extent.  I would submit that Harper Lee made that hero’s journey and while her initial return home is reflected in Go Set a Watchman, her transformative work is seen in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Having made my own journey out and back home again, I can attest to the dismay in realizing that the people I revered and who nurtured and taught me so much, could also exhibit racist tendencies.  I cannot claim to be on a hero’s journey, but I think I understand some of the things at work in that archetypal expression.  I can see how Harper Lee would have been frustrated by the mindset of her friends back home, but since these are her loved ones, there is more than frustration.  When our travels break us free from those regional bonds and drop the scales from our eyes, so to speak, our first impulse is to demand that that everyone else “see the light” just as we have. The problem is that they have not left home; they have not been on that long transformative journey. The returning hero, as mythology points out, must then find some way to open the eyes of his people.

The Transformative Power of Story

Harper Lee found a way to open the eyes of her people and was able to craft the transformative work that would enable all of us to see ourselves in a new light. In other words, she completed the hero’s journey when she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.  She found something redemptive in that racist Southern culture that would give us all hope that things can be better than they are now.  When To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, most Southern whites were denying that there was a problem. Resistance against civil rights was widespread throughout the South. Harper Lee, however, not only gave hope to the movement for racial equality, she also showed the white people in power that there was some decency within them which meant that they did not have to be trapped in an evil racist system.  Not only was there hope for blacks to throw off the shackles of oppression, there was hope for whites to throw off their own shackles of bitter racism.

We were not there in 1960. Though we have made some progress, we are still not there in 2015. Thanks to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (which we now see came about by way of wrestling with the harsh realities of a racist culture in Go Set a Watchman) we have a transformative gift given to us by that hero with a thousand faces. Harper Lee took a hard painful look at the racist South and she found that element within our own culture that could save us from ourselves. That gift, it turns out is universal – it is not just for the South. That saving grace in the midst of injustice and oppression that we see in To Kill a Mockingbird has resonated through the years all over the world.

Many have left the South and have been changed by the experience of living somewhere else – tracing the hero’s journey. Many left and never come back and some returned. While others have come back home and tried to make a difference, only Harper Lee has returned to the South and given us something so astounding as To Kill a Mockingbird.  Rather than mourn over the clay feet of a fictional character, or fret over the awkwardness of literary first drafts, I choose to be grateful for Harper Lee and the hero’s journey that she has demonstrated to world.


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A New Novel by Harper Lee - Literary Prize, or Vulture's Prey?

Chicago Tribune photo by Terrence Antonio James

The news this week is about a “new” novel by Harper Lee. Last summer on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, I did a blog post in honor of the acclaimed Alabama author. When I heard the news of another novel by Ms. Lee, Go Set a Watchman, I was at once excited by it but also skeptical about the author’s wishes to have it published.

Here is a quote from the publisher's announcement:

Go Set a Watchman is set during the mid-1950s and features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years later. Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus. She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.

Many news outlets, of course, have had a field day with the news. NPR noted on their website:

As second novels go, this one should prove a doozy. More than five decades after Harper Lee published her first — and, so far, only — novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee's publisher has announced that she plans to release a new one. The book, currently titled Go Set a Watchman, will be published July 14.

The Associated Press, which broke the news, reports that Lee actually finished the 304-page novel in the mid-1950s — before Mockingbird was published in 1960 — but Lee had decided to shelve the work at the time. Lee says she was surprised to stumble upon Watchman again last fall, after her friend and attorney Tonja Carter unearthed an old manuscript that had been attached to an original typescript of Mockingbird.

Some Were Skeptical

The problem I had, in the midst of my excitement, is that I know there have been questions in recent years about whether Ms. Lee has been manipulated into signing things by those in charge of her legal affairs. It turns out I am not the only one who has some concerns.

Birmingham journalist, Kyle Whitmire, grew up in Southwest Alabama near Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville. In his article for The Birmingham News he tells of his early class room experience where “Our teachers also taught us the rule. If by some chance you meet her, you may introduce yourself, and you may ask her about almost whatever you wanted - politics, the weather - but never the book.” Whitmire is skeptical about the release of a new novel by the author. “I want there to be another book,” he writes, “But the bucket brigade of publishers, agents and lawyers between her and the public need to give a complete account first of how this other book came to be found and published, or I won't read it. They have a lot of explaining to do. I'll respect Nelle Harper Lee's silence, as I was taught as a child. But not theirs.”

In another article from Real Time News from AL.com, Connor Sheets is equally skeptical:

The historical record seems to demonstrate that Lee did not want her other book published, as it remained a closely held secret for decades. Her sister, Alice Lee, died at the age of 103 in November after defending Lee's legacy and estate against circling vultures in the publishing industry who might have caught wind of her unpublished novel.

According to Ed Pilkington writing from Monroeville, the whole town has questions about the publication of the new book. In “Harper Lee book news leaves home town surprised, bemused and skeptical” Pilkington writes:

But with such meager access, many in the town are left wondering whether Lee has been manipulated. Many also wonder why so many strange things began to happen once Alice, her greatest friend and protector – her “Atticus in a skirt”, as she was said to have once called her – retired and then passed away.

A Measured View

If I may be allowed to have conflicted views, here is my thinking at the moment.  It may be that the publishers are the vultures who finally got through to make a little more money. On the other hand, since the novel was written prior to To Kill A Mockingbird, I can see literary value in it just to see what the author was thinking, what her writing was like and what she was focused on in the period leading up to TKAM. For those defending Harper Lee’s privacy and personal wishes, I can see that it is quite possible that the author may simply not have wanted her earlier writing made public, given that she was so reticent in all things regarding TKAM in spite of so much public interest throughout the years.

I want to read it. I’m not sure I want to buy it. I want to take a long look, I want to drink it in, but I don’t want to invade a respected author’s privacy. I want to walk through her wonderful house, as it were, but I don’t want to barge in uninvited.  I want Harper Lee to tell us everything, but I respect her right to tell us nothing more than what she has already said in her acclaimed novel. I want this information to be out there in public, just like the keepers of J.R.R. Tolkein’s estate released so many unpublished tales from Middle Earth to shed light on The Lord of the Rings. I do not want to think about how the keepers of Harper Lee’s estate may be pulling a fast one. 

But it is Harper Lee’s writing – it must be good. It is about Scout all grown up, and Atticus is there to. Surely there is great benefit in that. In the end, our life’s choices are like what I imagine Atticus Finch would advise, we walk with our eyes open to all the nuances of justice and injustice, then we do the thing that we can best live with as we carry on with our lives.

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Harper Lee: Treasure of the South, Gift to the World

Harper Lee in 2006
 (Birmingham News photo by Linda Stelter)

It has been 54 years since Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird. In 2010, with the 50th anniversary of the book's publication, Harper Lee and her novel were the topic for many a publication.  BBC News Magazine published an article exploring why To Kill a Mockingbird continues to be so hugely popular in Great Britain. In publications almost as foreign to some of us in the South, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Smithsonian Magazine all featured articles  trying to explain the Harper Lee phenomenon.  Those articles were, respectively, “The Courthouse Ring,” “What 'To Kill a Mockingbird' Isn't,” and “Harper Lee's Novel Achievement.”

Every summer, Harper Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, hosts tourists from all over the world who come to see the town that inspired her novel, to visit the old courthouse, and to see the theatrical production of To Kill a Mockingbird, performed by local actors. I have never been go Monroeville, but two of my friends made the trek this summer to see the play. One day I'll make it over there. It is one of those things on my "bucket list" of things to do before I die.

Lee's novel is a perennial best-seller, and the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird is a cinematic work of art in itself. My main point in featuring Harper Lee is to share what two Southerners have said recently about Harper Lee. I am no expert on the renowned author, and certainly make no claims of any personal knowledge of her. I much prefer for you to hear what Wayne Flynt has said about why Harper Lee wrote only one novel, and to read what journalist John Archibald has written about what we may learn about Harper Lee from reading her novel.

A Most Graceful Dance 

Wayne Flynt, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Auburn University, is a widely sought after speaker and author of many books including Poor but Proud, and Keeping Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives. He has visited with Harper Lee on numerous occasions and in a recorded interview offered his theory on why she only wrote one book.  An historian who is superbly nimble with statistics, Flynt readily calls to mind statistics which he sets to a graceful dance in celebration of To Kill a Mockingbird:

"Harper Lee, Bless her soul, has become Boo Radley"

John Archibald is a columnist for the Alabama Media Group whose work appears in The Birmingham News. He recently did an opinion piece which implores the public to stop trying to draw the reclusive author out, but rather to take a look into her writing to see who she is and to see the gifts she has given us:

  

There's so much talk about Harper Lee. Has the first lady of Alabama literature finally gone 'round the bend? Has she lost herself, holed up in that Monroeville world of hers? Has she simply put her trust in the wrong people?

Everybody wants to know, to draw her out into the sunlight. Was she suckered by a sweet-talking carpet-bagging biographer? Or was it Lee herself who did the suckering?

Stop it. Just stop it. Because if there's a story to be told about Harper Lee, Lee herself already told it better than anyone. In To Kill  A Mockingbird.  (Please continue reading Archibald’s essay here.)

A Realistic Hope

My guess is that the world will continue to be enthralled by Harper Lee’s one book, and that people will continue to make pilgrimages to Monroeville, Alabama to see the place and to touch the courthouse rails where a story for all the ages was born. For as long as we are enthralled, and as long as we look at that story of justice denied with a measure of hope in our hearts, we will be all the better for it. We will forever have Harper Lee to thank for a vision of a time in the past that is not the “one brief shining moment” of an idealistic Camelot. Neither is it sentimental nostalgia.  Instead, it is a look into ourselves to see why we live in the communities we have created, and how we can have hope that we can do better.

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Photo: The photo of Harper Lee is by Linda Stetler and is from The Birmingham News file. It is a 2006  reception for her at the Alys Stephens Center in Birmingham, where she received a lifetime achievement award from The Birmingham Pledge. 

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