To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

It was 1957 before Lee managed to finish a draft of her novel. The first editor who read the manuscript turned it down, explaining that it was nothing more than a series of short stories strung together. Lee agreed with the criticism, and took the draft back for reworking. With help from her editor, Lee spent the next two and a half years transforming the manuscript into the novel you know today as To Kill a Mockingbird. There were many times when she became discouraged and doubted that the book would ever be published. She later said that these years remained in her memory as "a long and hopeless period of writing the book over and over again."

Finally in 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird was ready for publication. The reception of the novel made up for all the years of hard work and struggle. Not only was the book well liked by reviewers, it was an instant success with readers young and old. Several book clubs, including the Literary Guild, chose the novel as a selection. The movie rights were sold almost immediately, the story becoming the basis for a successful movie starring Gregory Peck in the role of the small-town lawyer Atticus Finch. In 1961 Lee's success was crowned with a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, making her the first woman to win the award since 1942.

As a result of the success of her first novel, Harper Lee became something of a celebrity. She was the subject of articles in such magazines as Life and Newsweek, and the elite fashion magazine Vogue published one of her essays. It soon became apparent that Lee did not enjoy being the center of so much attention. Although by no means a hermit, she seemed to have some of the impulse that led people like her eccentric character Boo Radley to avoid public exposure. Lee insisted that in spite of her success she still considered herself a journeyman writer, and she turned aside attempts to get her to answer personal questions with witty but not very revealing answers. Having returned to Alabama to work on her second novel, Lee complained that even there it was difficult to find the privacy she needed to work without interruption. In the South, she said, friends and neighbors who know you are working at home think nothing of dropping by unannounced for coffee.

In 1961, shortly after To Kill a Mockingbird was published, Harper Lee told interviewers that her second novel was already begun. Its subject, she said, would be the eccentric characters who seemed to abound in small southern towns.

More than twenty years have gone by since Lee gave this description of her forthcoming work, and the novel has yet to appear. Nor has Lee ever given a public explanation for the long delay.

The success of To Kill a Mockingbird was by no means a fluke. The novel was the product of a long dedication to the craft of writing, and years of hard work devoted to shaping the manuscript into its final form. Perhaps the best measure of the novel's quality is that it has aged very little in two and a half decades. Readers still see themselves in the characters of Scout and Jem Finch, and are moved in turn to tears and laughter by the story.
NEXT
BACK