When Charles J Shields's biography of Harper Lee came out in 2006, it was hailed as the definitive study of the famously private author and her singular 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Like so many journalists before him, Shields was rebuffed when he asked to interview Lee and her closest relatives. He found surprisingly little correspondence from her in library collections. So to reconstruct her life, he interviewed 80 people, including friends, former classmates and neighbours, and parsed her novel for autobiographical clues. The resulting biography was about as intimate a book as a scholar could write about an author who kept the world at a distance.
But a lot changed over the next decade. After Shields's biography was published, Lee filed lawsuits against her former literary agent and the museum in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala. In 2011, Lee issued a statement through her lawyer denying that she had authorised another book about her, The Mockingbird Next Door, by the journalist Marja Mills. Shields decided he needed to update his biography.
The new edition of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, out Tuesday, paints a more nuanced and in some ways perplexing portrait of Lee, who died in February at age 89, leaving many questions unanswered. Below are edited excerpts from a recent phone interview with Shields.
In the decade since the book was first published, Harper Lee's career and legacy has changed dramatically. How does your understanding of her now differ from how you saw her when you published the biography?
Somehow, she managed to pack a lot into the past 10 years. When I first published the biography, I saw Harper Lee as the sole author of the book, as if it had sprung fully formed for her forehead. After Go Set a Watchman came out, that became a touchstone against which to evaluate To Kill a Mockingbird. Without the benefit of having another book in hand, I took To Kill a Mockingbird at face value. Now I see it in a different light. I see the influence of her editor, Tay Hohoff, much more now. Go Set a Watchman is highly autobiographical. I think she exposes more of herself than she really wants to.
Reviews of Watchman were mixed, but even people who found it to be vastly inferior to Mockingbird agree that it sheds new light on her creative process and her thoughts on the Civil Rights movement and Southern politics. Where do you come down on the Watchman debate?
It's an important cultural document. But I would never hold it up to a class and say, "You must read this, it's a classic." If anything, it's a good book about what not to do. There's too much exposition and not enough dramatisation.
Harper Lee apparently was not a fan of your book about her and told friends not to read it. Did you ever learn what she objected to?
The objections were kept very general. I heard she and her sister Alice were not happy with the biography. I heard from a friend of hers that they did not like the portrayal of their mother. They were very sensitive about that. Lee was a manic depressive. I tried to be as discreet as I could, but since it plays into To Kill a Mockingbird, I had to answer the question. Where's the mother in To Kill a Mockingbird? She's in her room, not speaking to anyone, or leaving the house without permission. Harper Lee identified more with her father than her mother.
She stopped giving formal interviews for the most part in the 1960s. What questions would you have most liked to ask her, if you could?
I would have liked to have asked her whether her father did indeed change his views on segregation at the end of his life because the gentleman was only alive for a short time after To Kill a Mockingbird came out. I'd like to know if it was the book and daughter that changed his mind, or did he see the direction things were going?
I would like to know the answer to whether she was every deeply in love with someone. She's obviously a woman of deep compassion. She's a keen observer of human drama; that empathy is at the core of To Kill a Mockingbird. I would like to know if she had the blessing of ever being in love with someone. Freud said the two components of a contented life are love and work. We know a lot about the work side of Harper Lee and not so much about the love side of Harper Lee.
© 2016 The New York Times
Like so many journalists before him, Shields was rebuffed when he asked to interview Lee and her closest relatives. He found surprisingly little correspondence from her in library collections. So to reconstruct her life, he interviewed 80 people, including friends, former classmates and neighbours, and parsed her novel for autobiographical clues. The resulting biography was about as intimate a book as a scholar could write about an author who kept the world at a distance.
But a lot changed over the next decade. After Shields's biography was published, Lee filed lawsuits against her former literary agent and the museum in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala. In 2011, Lee issued a statement through her lawyer denying that she had authorised another book about her, The Mockingbird Next Door, by the journalist Marja Mills. Shields decided he needed to update his biography.
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He was already at work on the new edition in 2015, when Lee's publisher, HarperCollins, announced that she would release a second novel, Go Set a Watchman, which she wrote in the mid 1950s. The novel, which portrayed Atticus Finch, the hero of Mockingbird, as a racist, shocked readers and scholars.
The new edition of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, out Tuesday, paints a more nuanced and in some ways perplexing portrait of Lee, who died in February at age 89, leaving many questions unanswered. Below are edited excerpts from a recent phone interview with Shields.
In the decade since the book was first published, Harper Lee's career and legacy has changed dramatically. How does your understanding of her now differ from how you saw her when you published the biography?
Somehow, she managed to pack a lot into the past 10 years. When I first published the biography, I saw Harper Lee as the sole author of the book, as if it had sprung fully formed for her forehead. After Go Set a Watchman came out, that became a touchstone against which to evaluate To Kill a Mockingbird. Without the benefit of having another book in hand, I took To Kill a Mockingbird at face value. Now I see it in a different light. I see the influence of her editor, Tay Hohoff, much more now. Go Set a Watchman is highly autobiographical. I think she exposes more of herself than she really wants to.
Reviews of Watchman were mixed, but even people who found it to be vastly inferior to Mockingbird agree that it sheds new light on her creative process and her thoughts on the Civil Rights movement and Southern politics. Where do you come down on the Watchman debate?
It's an important cultural document. But I would never hold it up to a class and say, "You must read this, it's a classic." If anything, it's a good book about what not to do. There's too much exposition and not enough dramatisation.
Harper Lee apparently was not a fan of your book about her and told friends not to read it. Did you ever learn what she objected to?
The objections were kept very general. I heard she and her sister Alice were not happy with the biography. I heard from a friend of hers that they did not like the portrayal of their mother. They were very sensitive about that. Lee was a manic depressive. I tried to be as discreet as I could, but since it plays into To Kill a Mockingbird, I had to answer the question. Where's the mother in To Kill a Mockingbird? She's in her room, not speaking to anyone, or leaving the house without permission. Harper Lee identified more with her father than her mother.
She stopped giving formal interviews for the most part in the 1960s. What questions would you have most liked to ask her, if you could?
I would have liked to have asked her whether her father did indeed change his views on segregation at the end of his life because the gentleman was only alive for a short time after To Kill a Mockingbird came out. I'd like to know if it was the book and daughter that changed his mind, or did he see the direction things were going?
I would like to know the answer to whether she was every deeply in love with someone. She's obviously a woman of deep compassion. She's a keen observer of human drama; that empathy is at the core of To Kill a Mockingbird. I would like to know if she had the blessing of ever being in love with someone. Freud said the two components of a contented life are love and work. We know a lot about the work side of Harper Lee and not so much about the love side of Harper Lee.
© 2016 The New York Times