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    LIFE The Enduring Legacy of Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird
    LIFE The Enduring Legacy of Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird
    LIFE The Enduring Legacy of Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird
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    LIFE The Enduring Legacy of Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird

    By The Editors of LIFE

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    LIFE celebrates Harper Lee, author of one of the most beloved works of American fiction.

    When HarperCollins published To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, it quickly became a runaway bestseller-and its author, Harper Lee, an overnight literary celebrity. In this special edition, LIFE delves into its famous archives to present a rich, beautifully illustrated commemoration of Lee's life and legacy. Through essays, photographs and archival materials, LIFE revisits To Kill a Mockingbird and helps us understand its magic, exploring how the coming-of-age story of a tomboy in a small Southern town became an enduring touchstone of our cultural consciousness.

    This collectable volume features photographs from LIFE's 1961 profile of Lee, taken in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., where she lived until her death in 2016. These indelible images-some reproduced here for the first time-reveal an intimate portrait of the famously shy author, showing her with her father at their childhood home and in the local courtroom that inspired the setting for the trial in Mockingbird.The book also goes behind the scenes of the Oscar Award-winning film adaptation that starred Gregory Peck in his legendary role as Atticus Finch. Mockingbird's transformation from an explosively popular novel into a classic Hollywood film is captured here in LIFE's photographs from the set, film stills, and anecdotes from those close to the project.

    Lee's story would not be complete without an exploration of the long-awaited sequel, Go Set a Watchman. TIME's arts critic Daniel D'Addario reviews the novel-published from a manuscript long thought to be lost-that set the literary world aflame in 2015.

    Throughout, LIFE's special edition incorporates reproductions of unique ephemera, including Peck's original film script with his handwritten annotations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLife
    Release dateMay 13, 2016
    ISBN9781683303633
    LIFE The Enduring Legacy of Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird

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      Book preview

      LIFE The Enduring Legacy of Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird - The Editors of LIFE

      THE ENDURING LEGACY OF

      HARPER LEE AND TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

      CONTENTS

      Cover

      Title

      Introduction: A Great American Novelist

      Foreword by Melissa Fay Greene

      Nelle: The Woman Who Wrote the Books

      Hollywood Goes Monroeville

      The Big Movie

      Mockingbird’s Legacy

      Her Last Chapter

      Just One More

      Copyright

      Portions of this edition appeared previously in TIME and on EW.com.

      INTRODUCTION

      A Great American Novelist

      Harper Lee spun her small-town Alabama childhood into a race-relations parable ahead of its time. Her classic To Kill a Mockingbird ranks with the best, alongside The Great Gatsby and Moby-Dick. Then, not long before her death, the author made headlines again with a shocking sequel.

      HULTON/GETTY

      NELLE HARPER LEE is seen here in a circa-1960 portrait with her book completed but just beginning its astonishing ride.

      Harper Lee wrote one book so tremendous, and with such insight into the American character and issues in the American story, that it immediately became a touchstone of our cultural consciousness. Then, less than a year before her death at 89 in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, she published a sequel that upended the assumptions about her characters and provoked a new debate about her timeless classic. Beyond being a regional masterpiece, the basis of a classic film, a reading-list perennial and a blockbuster novel that still sells over a million copies every year, Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has earned, without hyperbole, that rare honored status: widely beloved. In 2015, Lee made frequent headlines with the controversial publication of her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, which was initially an early draft of Mockingbird.

      Set in Depression-era Alabama, To Kill a Mockingbird is the story of Atticus Finch—a white lawyer crusading for a black defendant falsely accused of rape and a widower idolized by his two children, Scout and Jem. Its characters come straight from the author’s childhood: Her own father, like Finch, was a lawyer and state legislator—and Finch, in fact, was her mother’s maiden name. Nelle Harper Lee herself was, as a girl, as tomboyish as Scout, and the precocious playmate Dill was based on the boy next door, Truman Persons, who, grown up and using the last name Capote, employed Lee as a researcher for his true-crime classic In Cold Blood. Mockingbird will head to Broadway in 2017, with Aaron Sorkin set to write a new stage adaption.

      Harper Lee considered getting into the family business but quit law school one semester shy of graduating to make herself a writer. In 1949, she moved to New York City and spent almost a decade crafting short stories no editor found publishable. But then an agent suggested that she expand one story into a novel, and To Kill a Mockingbird appeared in July 1960. In its first year out, the book sold 500,000 copies and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In its second year, it remained on the best-seller list and in 1962 became a hit at the movies. The film version was nominated for eight Oscars and won three, including a Best Actor trophy for Gregory Peck. When a reporter asked Lee if she found her second novel coming slowly, she parried, Well, I hope to live to see it published. As the years passed and no new book appeared, gossip filled the void: She was crafting her memoirs. She was working on a nonfiction story about a murderous Alabama preacher. Soon Lee began swearing that she’d changed her mind: She’d never publish another book.

      That abruptly changed with the July 2015 publication of Go Set a Watchman, which generated plenty of controversy: Was Lee lucid enough to give consent, given the damaging stroke she suffered? Was it any accident that this book was appearing so soon after the death of Lee’s sister/gatekeeper, Alice? Was this purely a cash grab by Lee’s lawyer and caretaker, Tonja B. Carter? And finally: What would the book—which portrays Atticus Finch as a card-carrying racist, do to Mockingbird’s legacy? For her part, Lee made several statements through her lawyer saying she was happy as hell about Watchman’s publication. Upon its release, the book ended up selling 1.1 million copies in less than a week, despite decidedly mixed reviews from critics.

      Lee never addressed the Watchman controversy in an interview. That’s not surprising, since she spoke only rarely to the press, granting her last lengthy interview in 1964. But she was never a hardened recluse, either, dividing her time between New York City and the house she shared in Monroeville with Alice until her health declined and she had to enter an assisted-living facility. Though she was a private person, she carried out a social life—especially in Monroeville, where she was zealously protected by the towns­people. For decades, she answered fan mail, blurbed the rare book and occasionally materialized, as gracious as she was quiet, to accept an award.

      The world knows Harper Lee was a brilliant writer, but what many don’t know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness, Michael Morrison, president and publisher of HarperCollins, said in a statement. She lived her life the way she wanted to—in private—surrounded by books and the people who loved her.

      In this special edition of LIFE, we bring you an exclusive look inside the life of Harper Lee. Melissa Fay Greene, the author of Praying for Sheetrock, tells the story behind the story: How Lee spun her life in small-town Alabama into a race-relations parable ahead of its time. In the day, LIFE visited her at home in Monroeville, and those photos are presented here as treasures, as are the behind-the-scenes photos from the film set of Mockingbird. Herewith is the story of Nelle Harper Lee, the woman behind the books.

      —By Troy Patterson, Isabella Biedenharn and Tina Jordan

      FOREWORD

      The Story Behind This Story

      By Melissa Fay Greene

      M. SPENCER GREEN/AP

      GREGORY PECK’S original script from the 1962 movie To Kill a Mockingbird, with his notations, and above that, a photograph showing Peck as the lawyer Atticus Finch, studying the script with actress Mary Badham, who played Finch’s daughter, Scout, in the movie.

      A few giants towered above the others on the fiction best-seller lists in the early 1960s: James Michener, Irving Wallace, Herman Wouk, Irving Stone, Saul Bellow, John O’Hara, Leon Uris, their titles flashing their authors’ intentions to loosen their ties, put down their bourbons, tamp out their cigarettes or pipes and confront their Smith Corona typewriters long enough to chisel truth from granite: Advise and Consent, The Agony and the Ecstasy, The Ugly American, The Source, Armageddon. Into this manly realm with its scent of Old Spice and Aqua Velva, in the summer of 1960, tiptoed a young slip of a book with an artsy cover and the odd name To Kill a Mockingbird. It told, in an elliptical and poetical and round about way, the coming-of-age story of a motherless little Alabama white girl whose daddy, a country lawyer, defies Depression-era social convention and takes

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