When To Kill a Mockingbird was published in the summer of 1960, it seemed to have sprung from nowhere, like an Alabamian Athena: a perfectly formed novel from an unknown southern writer without any evident precedent or antecedent. The book somehow managed to be both urgently of its time and instantly timeless, addressing the era’s most turbulent issues, from the civil rights movement to the sexual revolution, while also speaking in the register of the eternal, from the moral awakening of children and the abiding love of families to the frictions between the self and society.
But no writer is without influences and aspirations: Harper Lee had, of course, come from somewhere and worked tremendously hard to become someone. It was only because she did not like talking about herself that her origins seemed so mysterious, and inevitably, the better To Kill a Mockingbird did – becoming a bestseller and then winning a Pulitzer prize, selling 1m copies and then 10m and then 40m – the more theories and rumours rushed in to fill her silence. In the years after the book came out, the public image of Lee swung between two of her beloved characters: she was either the living incarnation of her feisty, tomboyish heroine Jean Louise “Scout” Finch or, in her seeming reclusiveness, a version of that shy shadow figure, Arthur “Boo” Radley.
How thrilling, then, to encounter a time capsule from the start of Lee’s career: a collection of some of her earliest short stories, appearing now in print for the first time, helps explain how the little girl from South Alabama Avenue turned herself into a bestselling author. Drafted in the decade before To Kill a Mockingbird, after Lee had first moved to New York City in 1949, the stories feature some of the characters and settings she would soon make famous and reveal some of the contradictions and conflicts she would spend her life trying to resolve.
Nelle Harper Lee was born on 28 April 1926, the last of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch’s four children. Fifteen years younger than her oldest sibling, she grew up feeling as if she had her own private childhood in the small town of Monroeville, Alabama. Because her siblings were so much older, she watched them one by one fulfil the dreams of their parents: a respectable legal career alongside their father for her sister Alice; a loving marriage and homemaker’s life for her sister Louise; heroic military service in the second world war for her brother Edwin. For a long while, it seemed as if Lee would be the family’s one great disappointment: she dropped out of the University of Alabama a semester shy of graduation, fleeing to the disreputable north and abandoning the law degree that would have allowed her father to add an “s” to the family firm’s shingle. But while AC Lee and Daughters was not meant to be and Lee did not become a lawyer, she did eventually create the most admired attorney in the United States.
Although Lee never formally studied creative writing, she spent her years in Tuscaloosa teaching herself to write. She had a recurring column in the college newspaper, The Crimson White, and contributed sketches to the student humour magazine, Rammer Jammer, which she eventually edited. Even then, her roving curiosity and intellectual range were evident on the page – in a review of recent British films, a parody of Shakespeare, a roast of the rural newspaper her father edited and owned. Lee wore blue jeans and Bermuda shorts at a time when women were discouraged from wearing anything but dresses, and once scandalised the entire campus by smoking a cigar on the hood of a car in the homecoming parade.
Lee knew approximately one person in New York City when she moved there at 23, but what a person he was: Truman Capote, who had spent some of his childhood living next door to her, and who would later serve as the model for the puny, puckish Charles Baker “Dill” Harris in her novel. The budding authors felt like “apart people”, as Capote later put it, already able to read years before their peers, playing with language the way others did dolls and footballs. The pair conspired with each other to write adventures, tall tales, and verses of the sort they so liked reading, from the Bobbsey Twins to Beowulf and the Rover Boys to Rudyard Kipling, clattering away at the typewriter that AC Lee had given his bookish youngest daughter.
In lieu of college, Capote had gone directly to work as a copy boy at the New Yorker. A few years later, Lee landed her own job in publishing, for the monthly magazine of the American School Publishing Corporation, a trade rag called the School Executive. Eventually she left that day job for another, this one as an airline reservation clerk, which was less literary but theoretically more glamorous. The same could not be said of the rest of her life back then: around the edges of her nine-to-five work, she lived off peanut butter sandwiches while drafting stories at a desk she made for herself with two old apple crates and a door she found in the basement of her building.
Writing on that shaky surface, Lee gradually steadied her hand. “I do believe that my greatest talent lies in creative writing,” she wrote to her family, confidingly and confidently, “and I do believe I can make a living at it.” Like so many aspiring authors, she initially turned to that family and her own early life for material, and the first three stories in the new collection shuffle through a series of young narrators to explore the social mores, tiny transgressions and moral confusion of what, in one of her later stories, she calls “childhood’s secret society”. The stakes of The Water Tank, The Binoculars and The Pinking Shears, all written before she turned 30, are profoundly circumscribed – the approval of one’s parents and the acceptance of one’s peers – and the antagonists aren’t very grand either: teachers, siblings, schoolyard cliques.
The next three stories, by contrast, are all set in New York, with adult narrators, and one senses Lee trying to keep up with the Salingers and Cheevers. Still, that trio – A Roomful of Kibble, The Viewers and the Viewed and This Is Show Business? – does show her moving beyond incident and toward plot, while simultaneously experimenting with different narrative voices.
Characters taken directly from Lee’s own life appear throughout these tales. One sports her own nickname, Dody; others bear the names of her siblings, Edwin, Alice and Louise; some are thinly disguised or entirely undisguised versions of her friends, including future Monroeville mayor Anne Hines. Lee’s oldest sister, Alice, known to the whole family as “Bear”, is here transformed ever so slightly into “Doe”, but remains instantly recognisable despite the name: “She loved only three things in this world,” Lee writes, “the study and practice of law, camellias, and the Methodist Church.”
The name for which Harper Lee is most well known first appears in The Pinking Shears, when we meet “little Jean Louie”, a third-grade troublemaker who is rather awkwardly missing her “s”. By the last of the stories that appear in this collection, Miss Finch has officially become “Jean Louise”, though she’s not yet Scout. Those who knew Harper Lee best all summon her blistering intellect, and one of the pleasures of this final story is seeing that brilliance unleashed on the page.
Lee is funny and formidably smart on the simultaneous comfort and claustrophobia of returning as an adult to one’s childhood home. By the time she wrote The Land of Sweet Forever, she was well versed in such returns. Two years after she moved to New York, in the summer of 1951, her father had called from the Vaughan memorial hospital in Selma to say that her mother had been diagnosed with cancer of the liver and lungs. Before Lee could even arrange for travel home, he called again to say that Frances had died of a cardiac episode only a day after being diagnosed.
Six weeks later, that first dreadful phone call was followed by another, this one informing her that her beloved brother, Edwin, the inspiration for Jem in To Kill a Mockingbird, had died of a brain aneurysm at the air force base where he was stationed in Montgomery, leaving behind a wife and two young children. Lee flew home again, her already considerable grief and shock now overflowing. She was just 25 years old, but capturing her childhood had never felt more urgent, partly because, as she describes in one of these stories, The Cat’s Meow, her father and oldest sister soon sold the family home where she’d been born and raised, moving into a more modern house on the other side of town.
The move did not help the pair of homebodies escape the ghosts of South Alabama Avenue, and Lee, too, was haunted by memories of her mother, her brother and the world as it had existed before they died. She worried over her father and returned home often to help Alice with his care. She began writing stories that attempted to reconcile her chosen home with her childhood one, merging the subjectivity of her Manhattan stories with the setting of her Monroeville stories, a kind of integrative work she was attempting both on and off the page.
At the time, Lee’s politics were still taking shape. Her hometown was strictly segregated, with schools, churches and restaurants divided by race. In college, she had written about the horrors of racial violence and made herself comfortable among the radicals on the student newspaper. Upon arriving in Manhattan, however, she settled into a society more diverse than any she’d ever known.
For a long time, the stories she wrote during those early years in Manhattan were just tantalising titles typed on a smudged and stained index card in the archives of her agents, Annie Laurie Williams and Maurice Crain. None was published, and for decades scholars and biographers alike wondered what had become of them. Four of them finally appear in The Land of Sweet Forever; together with the other four, they were found in the last of the novelist’s New York City apartments, this one at 433 East 82nd Street, where she moved the year To Kill a Mockingbird was published and where she lived another four decades until a stroke sent her home to Alabama for good.
Happily for posterity, Lee was a pack rat: when that apartment was cleaned out, there amid piles of her correspondence and practically every pay stub, telephone bill and cancelled cheque ever issued to her, were her notebooks and manuscripts, including the eight stories and eight nonfiction pieces. The essays, which were published in the decades after To Kill a Mockingbird, make clear that Lee enjoyed the career she’d always wanted, even if her fans never got from her the career they expected. Her masterpiece was adapted into a wildly successful and award-winning film, has never been out of print and was translated into dozens of languages. But she never wrote the sequel or second novel that so many of her admirers yearned for, and when, at the age of 89, she did finally publish another book, it was Go Set a Watchman, the first one she’d ever written, originally submitted to publishers the same year as The Binoculars.
“I am more of a rewriter than a writer,” Lee once said, explaining that she generally worked through at least three drafts of any given piece of writing. Some of that hard work is visible here, not only on the physical manuscripts themselves, but on comparing the early stories to her published novels. The Binoculars, for instance, was abridged and adapted into the pedagogical standoff in the second chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird, when Scout’s first-grade teacher gets frustrated with her for knowing how to read. Similarly, The Land of Sweet Forever became a set-piece in the seventh chapter of Go Set a Watchman, when Scout returns home to Maycomb from New York City.
Between the title pages and her literary agency’s records, we know that Lee spent seven years writing and revising these short stories and then, after they caught her agent’s eye and he encouraged her to try for something longer, spent another three years turning those stories into chapters, and those chapters into novels – first Go Set a Watchman and then To Kill a Mockingbird.
All this would have taken even longer had it not been for an extraordinary gift Lee received, which she describes in one of the best essays collected here, Christmas to Me. Among her closest friends in New York were a husband and wife, Michael and Joy Brown, who had long championed her career. It was Michael Brown, a celebrated lyricist and composer, who had first introduced Lee to her literary agents, shortly before Thanksgiving in 1956, and he and his wife both delighted in her stories and in the remarkable letters she sent them from back home in Alabama – small masterpieces of the epistolary form, specific and funny, sociologically astute, surprisingly tender.
The Browns and Lee were in the habit of spending Christmas together, and they had developed a tradition of trying to see which of them could give the least expensive yet most outrageous gift. That year, Lee had spent 35 cents on a portrait of an obscure English cleric for Michael and acquired a bargain copy of the complete works of a slightly less obscure British aristocrat for Joy. When it came time for the Browns to present the novelist with her gift, they pointed to an envelope on their tree. It seemed appropriately modest from the outside, but in fact, they had radically broken with tradition: inside was a note that read, “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” That month, and nearly every month thereafter for the next year, they wrote her a cheque for $100, five times her rent, insisting they wanted nothing in return.
For decades, that gift has seemed shocking, an act so generous it bordered on the preposterous. Now, though, with the rediscovery of these stories, we get to see what Lee’s friends saw all those years ago: a lawyer father not yet named Atticus but already modelling high-mindedness and teaching his single-digit children civil procedure; a small-town versifier who feuds with the local newspaper printer over the propriety and theological permissibility of publishing obituaries for cows; a daughter of the south trying to map its mores on to her own emerging morals; glimpse after glimpse after glimpse of genius. No wonder the Browns gave Harper Lee that gift; it was no more lavish than her own.
