To the world, Harper Lee was aloof to the point of being unknowable. To Wayne Flynt, the Alabama-born author was his friend, Nelle.
in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a story of race, injustice and the law during the Jim Crow era. The town itself became Maycomb, the book’s setting.
Preferring football, softball, golf and books to small-town social affairs or college sororities, Lee’s well-known desire for privacy may have come in part from a feeling of being different from others growing up around her in the South, Flynt said.A childhood friend of fellow author Truman Capote, Lee was rarely heard from in public after her partly autobiographical “Mockingbird” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was made into a hit movie.
Flynt and his late wife knew Lee’s two sisters, and they became close to the author after she returned to Alabama for good following the stroke. They visited her at a rehabilitation center in Birmingham and then at an assisted living home in Monroeville, where she spent years before her death. Lee died just months after the release of her novelThe book doesn’t get into the most private aspects of Lee’s life; Flynt said they simply didn’t discuss such things.
Lee was steeped in literature and religion, Flynt said. She preferred the King James Version of the Bible to all others for its lyrical language, he said, and her favorite authors included Jane Austen and C.S. Lewis. “When she died, on her ottoman in her little two rooms, was the complete anthology of all of C.S. Lewis’ books. It must have weighed 50 pounds,” he said.While the first book was based on letters between the two, the new book is more meandering and conversational than the first in the tradition of Southern storytelling.Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission.
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