Introduction

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, became one of the most beloved novels of the twentieth century. Lee’s fellow Southerner and contemporary Flannery O’Connor was mystified by its success. “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they are buying a children’s book.” O’Connor, one of the finest short-story writers in American literature, failed to appreciate Lee’s caustic sense of humor and subversive social criticism. In the same category is another classic often mistaken for a children’s book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

There will always be a place on library shelves for good stories, and To Kill a Mockingbird certainly is one. It draws the reader into a deep fictional landscape. Readers return to To Kill a Mockingbird because they want to walk the dusty streets of 1930s Maycomb, run madly through Boo Radley’s backyard at night, or watch the trial of Tom Robinson play out to its disastrous end. Lee’s storytelling voice is strong.

Also, the novel’s emphasis on justice and compassion is timeless. You don’t need to be a Southerner, or for that matter an American, to understand its importance. A harmless man, Boo Radley, is feared because he’s peculiar. A good man, Tom Robinson, is denied the protection of the law because he isn’t white. The primitive fear of otherness is the root of most of the world’s evils.

And finally, To Kill a Mockingbird has the hallmark of all great works of literature: it reads you, the reader, as you read it. Great books and stories probe your convictions; silently, they ask what you stand for. As Atticus Finch leaves the courtroom—defeated but still true to himself—we wonder what it would be like to have people get to their feet out of respect for us, and what we would have to do to deserve it.

Consequently, no one could have anticipated how painful Atticus’s moral fall would be when Go Set a Watchman, Lee’s first published novel after fifty-five years, appeared in 2015. The hero of Depression-era southern Alabama, its moral compass, has turned into just a pleasant old man by the late 1950s when the novel is set, agreeing in spirit with Alabama Governor George Wallace, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” And because Go Set a Watchman arrived in bookstores, by coincidence, just two weeks after a white supremacist murdered nine people in a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, the overlap added to the disappointment—feelings of betrayal, even—that ran deep among many of Lee’s admirers. “You double-dealing, ring-tailed old son of a bitch!” Jean Louise shouts at her father.

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The purpose of this revision of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee is to complete the picture of the author and her work, and to consider how she could have written two such completely different novels. In the ten years after the original version of this biography was published in 2006, Lee was more in the public eye than ever during the previous half century. Two films arrived in theaters: Capote and Infamous, with distinguished actresses playing her. Then Lee unknowingly signed over the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird and had to fight to get it back. She also sued the Monroe County Heritage Museum in her hometown of Monroeville, alleging that the museum had profited from unauthorized use of her characters. More threats of litigation challenged the publication of a memoir in 2014 by a journalist who wrote about becoming her next-door neighbor and friend. Later that year, in November, Lee’s sister, Alice—her confidante, protector, and financial adviser—passed away at age one hundred and three. Three months later came the announcement that Go Set a Watchman, a supposedly lost novel, had been found.

So much has happened; there’s so much more to tell. Although one thing is constant: this revision, like the earlier version, was written without Lee’s permission, encouragement, or assistance.

    —CHARLES J. SHIELDS
Charlottesville, Virginia
2016

Copyright © 2016 by Charles J. Shields