To the world, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' author Harper Lee was aloof to the point of being unknowable. To Wayne Flynt, the Alabama-born author was his friend, Nelle.
Alabama historian Wayne Flynt holds a copy of his new book, “Afternoons with Harper Lee,” about the late author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” at a book-signing in Homewood, Ala., on Thursday, Sept. 22, 2022. Flynt and his late wife were friends with Lee, who died in 2016. To the world, Harper Lee was aloof to the point of being unknowable, an obsessively private person who spent most of her life avoiding the public gaze despite writing one of the best-selling books ever, “To Kill a Mockingbird.
Based on Flynt’s notes from dozens of visits with Lee over a decade before her death in 2016, the book is like sitting on a porch and hearing tales of Lee’s childhood and family in rural Alabama, her later life in New York and everything in between. That includes the time a grandfather who fought for the Confederacy survived the Battle of Gettysburg despite heavy losses to his Alabama unit, according to Flynt.
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.
The book doesn’t get into the most private aspects of Lee’s life; Flynt said they simply didn’t discuss such things. But it does recount her worsening isolation from deafness and blindness toward the end of her life; her love of gambling; the furor over “Watchman;” and her authorship of a still-unpublished manuscript about a bizarre murder case in central Alabama.
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