Nelle Harper Lee’s Writing Continues to Bring the South to Life and Life to Readers

“All I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama,” Harper Lee said in an interview.

Why Harper Lee wrote is as important as what she wrote.

“As you know, the South is still made up of thousands of tiny towns. There is a very definite social pattern in these towns that fascinates me. I think it is a rich social pattern. I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.”

Harper Lee, quoted in Mockingbird, by Charles J. Shields

Deep woods, high humidity, and summer heat accounted for the slow pace of life in the South before freeways cut across state lines and air-conditioned cars allowed travelers to bypass tiny towns, such as Monroeville, Alabama, where Harper Lee grew up.

Among the thousands and thousands of miles I have traveled in my life, countless road-trip-miles include every state throughout the South.

In fact, the last time my husband I drove from West Texas to Georgia, we stopped in Monroeville so I could see the where Nelle Harper Lee had lived. And as it happened, it’s where she had died just days earlier at age 89.

The flowers were still on her grave.

Stories Put Time and Place in a Bottle

As a writer, Nelle (Ellen spelled backwards) Harper Lee drew from her hometown and its history to create the fictional town Maycomb, Alabama as the setting for her classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

“Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow it was hotter back then . . . Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon . . . and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with . . . “

Chapter 1, To Kill a Mockingbird

Descriptive and sensory words transport the reader to a time and place where memorable characters live out a story of timeless importance and timely significance.

Thanks to the Christmas gift from friends, Nelle received a full year of financial support in order to focus solely on her writing. That year, she completed her first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird and then spent the next 3 years working with her publishing firm J. B. Lippincott on revisions.

Writer, take note. It’s revise, revise, and revise.

One of my writing books is titled The Eleventh Draft. Ugh.

Harper Lee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which in 1999 was awarded “Best Novel of the Century” as well.

Speaking about Writing . . .

Nelle told a college class of Creative Writing students:

“It’s absolutely essential that a writer know himself, for until he knows his abilities and limitations, his talents and his problems, he will be unable to produce anything of real value.

Secondly, you must be able to look coldly at what you do. The writer must know for whom he writes, why he writes, and if his writing says what he means for it to say. Writing is, in a way, a contest of knowing, of seeing the dream, of getting there, and of achieving what you set out to do. The simplest way to reach this goal is to simply say what you mean as clearly and precisely as you know how . . .

To be a serious writer requires discipline that is iron-fisted. It is sitting down and doing it whether you think you have it in you or not. Every day. Alone. Without interruption.”

Mockingbird, A Portrait of Harper Lee, Charles J. Shields

“Contrary to what most people think, there is no glamour in writing. In fact, it’s heartbreak most of the time.”

Harper Lee

This Little Writing World of Mine

Harper Lee said, “I would like to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world.”

In my world, writing is my attempt to leave some record of what I have experienced, observed, and what I think––to pay attention to life as I live it.

Actually sitting down to write is hard.

“Hard on the peace and hard on the furniture.” (That’s a line from my favorite Western, Silverado.)

“It’s just as hard to write a bad novel as it is to write a good one. And if a writer does come up with a manuscript worthy of publication, it is assured that many pages of unpublished material have preceded it.”

Harper Lee, speaking to a college Creative Writing class in 1966

Writing for Justice to Reach beyond Courtrooms

The deep undercurrent of To Kill a Mockingbird is racism, which remains alive in different ways today than how racism raged during the time Harper Lee lived, as well as the time period she wrote about.

The book Lee wrote reflects the language and prejudices of that time, serving as a historical marker for readers brave enough to look back, to acknowledge how far social justice has come since then, and to admit how far we have to go.

It’s the children in Harper Lee’s story who engage us as readers––their innocence and then discovery of a dark world filled with injustice, but a world also illuminated by human kindness.

Like Harper Lee, I feel there is something decent in the life I am living in Middle America, 2020––something that motivates me to write.

And too, I lament some of the good that is passing from the America I grew up in.

Yet I long for human kindness to prevail.

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” 

Atticus Finch

Maybe during this coronavirus pandemic, paying attention to life where we live it and then simply slowing down enough to appreciate the 24 hours in a day can bring into sharper relief the best parts of being alive now.