‘A glimpse of genius’: what do unpublished stories found in Harper Lee’s apartment tell us about the To Kill a Mockingbird author?
When she died, the writer left behind a cache of notebooks and manuscripts. Her biographer reveals what they tell us about her unlikely rise to literary stardom
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.