TRANSCRIPT
NARRATOR: A writer from a small southern town, Harper Lee wrote two novels.
The recent discovery of her first, 'Go Set a Watchman,' has been an exciting literary surprise, because her second, 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' once thought to be her only book, became an instant classic.
WINFREY: This was one of the first books I wanted to encourage other people to read.
CLARK: She was talking about her town and her family and all the people that she knew here.
McWHORTER: Even though it's such an indictment of racism, it's not really an indictment of the racist, because that was the normal then.
WINFREY: The kind of inner wisdom and compassion it took for her to understand what it was like to be in somebody else's skin.
That's pretty remarkable for that time.
BROKAW: She helped us get liberated from racism.
BOY: This book told you what it was really like.
McBRIDE: 'To Kill a Mockingbird' is a great book now, it was a great book yesterday, and it will be a great book tomorrow.
That's why Harper Lee is a great American writer.
WINFREY: Little old Harper Lee.
NARRATOR: Harper Lee -- next, on 'American Masters.'
REPORTER: What was your reaction to the success of 'To Kill a Mockingbird?'
I have often wondered how an author who wrote what became an immediate smash would react.
LEE: Well, my reaction to it was not one of surprise.
It was one of sheer numbness.
It was one of being hit over the head and knocked cold.
[ Laughs ] I never expected that the book would sell in the first place.
I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but I was hoping that maybe somebody might like it well enough to give me some encouragement about it.
NARRATOR: That was Harper Lee in 1964, talking about what was believed to be her first and only novel.
But that all changed in the fall of 2014... GUTHRIE: Now to the literary news that has so many people so excited.
REPORTER: Harper Collins is gonna be publishing a second novel by 'To Kill a Mockingbird' author Harper Lee.
NARRATOR: ...with the discovery of this manuscript, a novel Lee gave to a literary agent back in 1957.
Its title was 'Go Set a Watchman,' and even the author, who is now 89, thought it had been lost or destroyed long ago.
MORRISON: I was blown away. I was shocked.
I felt like I was being handed the most sacred thing I would ever hold in my hands.
NARRATOR: Michael Morrison is Harper Lee's publisher.
MORRISON: I didn't tell anybody about it. I locked it in my drawer.
At the end of the day, I put it in an interoffice envelope and carried it home and kept thinking, 'Please, God, don't let this be the day I get hit by a bus or get mugged.'
Went home that night and read the whole thing, and just fell in love with it from the first sentence.
It's very clear that this is the same woman who wrote 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
When we asked her for an official comment about 'Go Set a Watchman,' her response was -- and I wish I could do her accent, but I can't -- 'I don't know what to say.
I wrote it, and that's that.'
NARRATOR: And that's where it may have to stay.
How and why this happened is a mystery unlikely to be told by Harper Lee.
[ Folk music playing ] New York, 1957.
After nothing but rejection letters, Harper Lee was finally meeting with a publisher.
Editor Tay Hohoff later wrote about that first encounter.
WOMAN [ as Hohoff ]: 'On a hot day in June in 1957, a dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman walked shyly into our office on Fifth Avenue to meet most of the editorial staff.
Apparently, we looked formidable.
Harper Lee has since admitted she was terrified.'
NARRATOR: Her full name was Nelle Harper Lee.
She was 31 and a long way from the hills and fields of Alabama and her small town of Monroeville.
After eight years of supporting herself as an airline reservation agent, Lee would eventually have two manuscripts -- 'Go Set a Watchman,' which would be found again in a safety deposit box decades later, the other, entitled 'Atticus,' would go on to be the literary and film phenomenon 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
The evil assumption that all Negroes lie, all Negroes are basically immoral beings, all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women.
NARRATOR: The story of a Southern lawyer who defends an innocent man and his daughter who refuses to see things in black and white has never lost its power or meaning, more than 50 years and nearly 50 million copies later.
But 'To Kill a Mockingbird' might never have been if not for an extraordinary act of friendship.
Christmas, 1956.
With no time off from her job to go home to Alabama, Lee stayed in New York City.
WOMAN [ as Lee ]: 'To a displaced Southerner, Christmas in New York can be a rather melancholy occasion.'
NARRATOR: She later wrote in an essay for Harper Lee spent the holiday with her closest friends in the City, Joy and Michael Brown.
JOY: she used to come down, oh, three and four and five times a week and spent a lot of time with us.
And then we had two little boys.
MICHAEL: And Nelle often babysat for us.
And they loved her.
She was really part of the family.
JOY: I thought back then that essentially she was a writer.
She was not going to spend her life taking airline reservations or waitressing or what one does while one becomes something else.
MICHAEL: ♪ A very merry Chrimas ♪ ♪ Is what I wish for you ♪ NARRATOR: So when Michael, a songwriter and composer, finished a show and got paid... JOY: I thought, 'Here we have a tiny chunk of money.
Why don't we see if Nelle could take some time off?'
And I mentioned it to Michael, who immediately said, 'Oh, I think that's a great idea.'
WOMAN [ as Lee ]: 'There was an envelope on the tree addressed to me.
I opened it and read, 'You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please.
Merry Christmas.'' MICHAEL: We had read character sketches that she wrote about people in Monroeville, and they were so perceptive.
She just amazed us.
WOMAN [ as Lee ]: ''It's a fantastic gamble,' I murmured.
'It's such a great risk.'
My friend looked around his living room, at his boys, half buried under a pile of bright Christmas wrapping paper.
His eyes sparkled as they met his wife's, and they exchanged a glance of what seemed to me insufferable smugness.
Then he looked at me and said softly, 'No, honey, it's not a risk. It's a sure thing.'' MICHAEL: I knew if she could get her work seen that she'd have it.
And it was little enough to do for a fellow Southerner -- again, that tribal thing, you know?
WOMAN [ as Lee ]: 'Our faith in you is really all I heard them say.
I would do my best not to fail them.'
MICHAEL: But I never, never foresaw anything like this, like what happened.
JOY: They published 5,000 copies, for heaven sakes.
Who was going to buy 5,000 copies of her book?! Maybe 1,000 copies, but who else was going to ever buy this book?
[ Up-tempo music plays ] ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, Gregory Peck.
PECK: The world never seems as fresh and wonderful, as comforting and terrifying, as good and evil as it does when seen through the eyes of a child.
For a writer to capture that feeling is remarkable.
And perhaps that is why one book in the last few years has been so warmly embraced by tens of millions of people.
'To Kill a Mockingbird,' winner of the Pulitzer Prize and just about every other award a book can win.
And now, happily, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' becomes a motion picture, and its memorable characters come vividly alive... ATTICUS: I remember when my daddy gave me that gun.
He told me that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted... if I could hit 'em.
But to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird.
NARRATOR: The movie, written by Horton Foote and considered one of the best screen adaptations of all time, won three Academy Awards.
LOREN: ...Gregory Peck in 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
[ Cheers and applause ] BADHAM: You don't get a chance to have a film or a book like that very often, that makes such an impact on people's lives.
WINFREY: I remember starting it and just devouring it.
I fell in love with Scout. I wanted to be Scout.
I thought I was Scout.
LAMB: It was the first time in my life that a book had sort of captured me.
That was exciting.
I didn't realize that literature could do that.
BROKAW: I was still in college when it came out.
I was so struck by the universality of small towns, I had lived in small towns in South Dakota.
And I knew then, reading about Atticus, the kinds of -- not just pressures that he was under, but the magnifying glass that he lived in.
TRIGIANI: I got it off the Bookmobile in Big Stone Gap, Virginia.
And I was 12 years old.
It's a perfect time to read it because you start to be really aware of differences of people in the community, and I always was aware of an ethnic difference 'cause we were Italians in a small Southern town, so we always felt like we were from Pluto.
McBRIDE: I read a tattered copy at my house in Jamaica, Queens.
It was the first time I read a book by a white writer that really discussed the issues of racism in any way that was complicated and sophisticated.
CHILDRESS: I was on the porch of Miss Wanda Biggs' house, it was two doors down from Nelle Harper Lee's house, and I was about nine years old, and it's the reason I'm a writer.
CASH: I remember taking that feeling of integrity and sense of conscience and the idea that the way you behaved, whether people saw you or not, was central to becoming yourself.
RUSSO: Masterpieces are masterpieces not because they are flawless, but because they've tapped into something essential to us, at the heart of who we are and how we live.
WINFREY: This was one of the first books I wanted to encourage other people to read.
You know, 'Read this book, read this book, read this book!'
NARRATOR: More than half a century later, the novel is still required reading.
LAMB: I taught high school for 25 years.
And just about every year I did 'To Kill a Mockingbird' with students.
And it was a book that perennially, they read because they wanted to, not because they had to.
So, it cast the same spell for my students as it had for me.
MAN: Which particular scene that resonates with you, that you remember, and will probably remember forever? Nick?
NICK: When Atticus is questioning Mayella Ewell, and it's so obvious to everyone in that courtroom that she just made the whole thing up, that Tom Robinson was innocent, and yet the racism in that time was so great they couldn't let a black man who was obviously innocent go free.
BOY: Tom was broken by the court case, and I -- He really didn't want to live or didn't want to be in prison, like, in a world like that anymore, where he could be prosecuted for no just reason.
And the pain that Mrs. Robinson felt when Atticus told her that Tom had been shot 17 times, that really will stick with me for a while.
And it -- I think about it a lot.
BOY: It really teaches about judgment.
I mean, in the book, how do you judge Bob Ewell?
Do you judge him as some maniac, or... feel bad for him?
You can't -- It's all about judgment, and that's in life, too -- you have to make decisions.
LAMB: They dip their foot into the water and then they ease into the stream and the story and the language, and the voice in particular take them down a smooth ride.
And then you don't have to worry about whether or not they're doing the assignments.
They're doing -- They're reading voluntarily.
WOMAN: Why has this book been so special to people over the years?
BOY: This book, the truth that it told, it helped people, you know, go see what it was really like.
This book told you what it was really like.
And the people, of course, talk differently, they act differently, but they're the same people.
Same people, different time period.
WOMAN: All right, now, what about the language?
How does it make you feel, Clifford?
Is it gonna keep you from reading the book?
CLIFFORD: No. WOMAN: No, all right.
What do you think?
BOY: It is offensive because that stands for, like, if you didn't know anything, ignorant, and, uh, you just -- WOMAN: What stands for that? BOY: Uh, the 'N' word.
Even though it used those -- that language, it kind of influences you to keep reading.
WOMAN: Yeah, okay.
I wanted us to talk a little bit about the impact, and how important this novel is.
GIRL: The book, like, inspired me, because it showed how one person can change the whole world.
SMITH: It still has this galvanizing effect on a young reader.
I mean, it remains as relevant today as it was the very day that it was written.
It never ages.
NARRATOR: Harper Lee, who was 34 when 'To Kill a Mockingbird' was published, gave several interviews about the novel and the movie and then stopped.
Lee has made appearances, mainly to accept awards, and although the author has receded from public life, her characters remain indelible for generations of readers.
QUINDLEN: When I was a kid I collected insurrectionary, outspoken, not-girly girls in books.
There was 'Anne of Green Gables,' and there's Jo March in 'Little Women,' and there's Scout in 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
SCOUT: Darn you, Walter Cunningham!
BROKAW: Scout is irresistible. She's just irresistible.
KIPEN: She's a scamp and hysterically funny and no less funny as an adult looking back, although in a slightly more fermented and seasoned way.
And she's just great company.
BADHAM: I felt so attached to her.
I just wish I could have been as smart as Scout.
And always been there with the comeback, but, oh, well.
JEM: What do you think you're doing?! LAMB: I loved the fact that she's a little smartass.
She speaks first with her fists and then has to sort of back up three or four steps.
She's sort of an extension of like a Huck Finn character.
She's very typically an American character in that she is poking at the boundaries of good taste, and, you know, what's proper.
SCOUT: Hey, Miss Dubose.
MRS. DUBOSE: Don't you say 'hey' to me, you ugly girl.
You say 'Good afternoon, Miss Dubose.'
SKURNICK: She doesn't have a mother.
In many ways, her childhood is very lonely, and it's only her interest in other people that makes it a full childhood.
She's really an explorer.
She truly struggles in the way we struggle as adults to figure out how to be in the world.
SMITH: And here is Scout, you know, who believes in things, who is funny and curious and passionate and a tomboy, and I think Scout has done more for Southern womanhood than any other character in literature.
ATTICUS: Come on in here, Scout.
Have your breakfast.
TRIGIANI: 'Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire.
I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore britches.'
SCOUT: I still don't see why I have to wear a darn ol' dress.
TRIGIANI: 'Aunt Alexandra's vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the add-a-pearl necklace she gave me when I was born.
Furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father's lonely life.
I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants just as well, but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam.'
The emphasis that her Aunt Alexandra places on the way she looks -- well, this is what we do to girls, you know?
You're worth something if you're beautiful.
QUINDLEN: I think one of the reasons I became so obsessed with Harper Lee is because everything that she did convinced me that she was just a grown-up Scout who hadn't gone over to the dark side of being a girly girl.
SCOUT: Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it.
NARRATOR: A grown-up Scout is the narrator of 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
Scout is simultaneously an adult looking back and a child experiencing life in a small town.
A difficult feat -- ask any writer.
GURGANUS: Very very tough, because she has to both be a kid on the street and aware of the mad dogs and the spooky houses and have this beautiful vision of how justice works and all the creaking mechanisms of the courthouse.
McBRIDE: Many writers have tried it, many writers -- They do it all the time, you know -- the innocent-child business.
But this child sees the world as an adult.
She sees the world through a child's eyes, but with an adult's understanding.
And that's part of why this is a great book and that's part of why Harper Lee is a great American writer.
NARRATOR: But before she was a great American writer, Harper Lee was an airline reservationist with five short stories and a referral from her friends, the Browns.
Maurice Crain became her literary agent.
MAN: [ as Crain ] 'The author is a nice little Southern gal from Alabama and says 'Yes, ma'am' and 'No, ma'am'.' JOY: Well, he immediately spotted the kind of writer, obviously, that Nelle was.
And I think he began to shape it for her and would send her home, and she'd work on it more.
But he immediately got the feel of it.
Nelle told me fairly recently that they sent it off to 10 publishers who turned it down.
You know, 'talented girl,' et cetera -- whatever their reaction was -- but ultimately turned it down.
Lippincott in Philadelphia -- old, established, conservative publisher.
And the editor there, Tay Hohoff, she, too, like Maurice, she was a crucial element in the development.
NARRATOR: The manuscript, as Lippincott editor Hohoff later wrote, needed quite a bit of work.
WOMAN: [ as Hohoff ] 'There were many things wrong about it.
It was more a collection of short stories than a true novel.
And -- and yet, there was also life.
It was real.
The people walked solidly onto the pages.
They could be seen and felt.
Obviously a keen and witty and even wise mind was at work, but was it the mind of a professional novelist?
There were dangling threads of a plot.
It's an indication of how seriously we were impressed by the author that we signed a contract at that point.'
WOMAN: [ as Lee ] 'A long and hopeless period of writing the book over and over again...' NARRATOR: Is how Lee described what happened next.
The writer and the editor worked on the novel for two more years.
WOMAN [ as Hohoff ]: 'The book took shape, grew, matured, acquired depths and heights, absent from the delightful but incomplete manuscript we'd first seen, until its final triumphant metamorphosis into what is now called 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'' McBRIDE: 'When he was nearly 13, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
When it healed and Jem's fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury.
His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right.
When he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body.
He couldn't have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.'
The interesting thing about this paragraph is that this sets up the whole book, it sets up the whole story.
I reread this first passage to myself many times when I was writing 'The Color of Water.'
By speaking to the specific, the story of how her brother broke his arm, she speaks to the general problem of 400 years of racism, slavery, socioeconomic classism, the courage of the working class, the isolation of the South, the identity crises of a young girl, and the coming out of a neighborhood recluse.
All that in the story of her brother, who, when he was nearly 13, broke his arm.
BRAGG: 'When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident.
I maintained that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that.
He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.'
And it's that -- that one phrase, um... Said, 'it started long before that,' is -- I don't know -- Southern writers are always staying stuff to be profound like that, it's the quintessentially Southern phrase, but the truth is, down here, That's just the way it is.
[ Blues music plays ] LEE: I think we are a region of storytellers naturally.
Just from our tribal instincts.
We, um, did not have the pleasures of the theater, of the dance, of motion pictures when they came along.
We simply entertained each other by talking.
It's quite a thing -- if you've never gone or if you've never known a Southern small town.
LAMB: '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 then -- a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square.
Men's stiff collars wilted by 9:00 in the morning.
Ladies bathed before noon, after their 3:00 naps, and by nightfall were like soft tea cakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.'
SCOUT: There's no hurry, for there's nowhere to go and nothin' to buy, no money to buy it with.
Although Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.
NARRATOR: 'To Kill a Mockingbird' takes place between 1932 and 1935 -- the years Scout Finch grows from six to nine -- living with her father and brother not far from the center of town.
During those years in Monroeville, Harper Lee was the same age and growing up on South Alabama Avenue, two blocks from the town square and the courthouse.
She was born Nelle Harper Lee, the youngest daughter of Frances Finch -- the name she would later give her fictional family -- and Amasa Coleman Lee, called A.C.
Alice Finch Lee, the novelist's older sister, who is extremely hard of hearing at the age of 99, was still practicing law at the firm her father helped to found.
ALICE: We were a close family.
There was a lot of love in the family.
At home, we were... we were pretty much allowed to go in the direction that we wanted to go, unless we were headed the wrong way.
This was during the Depression, and children basically did not have many store-bought toys.
SCOUT: Me first, me first, me first, me first!
LEE: We had to use our own devices for our entertainment.
We didn't have much money. Nobody had any money.
We didn't have many toys to play with, nothing was done for us.
So the result was that we lived our imagination most of the time.
NARRATOR: A.C. Lee was a state legislator, the editor of the local paper, and a respected lawyer who worked in this courtroom while his daughter looked on.
As Lee later told magazine... WOMAN [ as Lee ]: I grew up in a courtroom and mostly I watched my father from the balcony.
He is one of the few men I've ever known who had genuine humility.
He had absolutely no ego drive, and so he was one of the most beloved men in this part of the state.
CLARK: People in town say that Mr. Lee -- Mr. A.C. Lee, her father -- was a lot like the character of Atticus.
Soft-spoken, dignified, and did the right thing.
That he was like that.
NARRATOR: It was Mr. Lee who set his daughter up with a typewriter.
Alice Lee says her sister was a gifted storyteller even as a child.
ALICE: She had a vivid imagination, and early on she would compose stories, and Daddy gave her an old beat-up typewriter, and she... typed that way, and the rest of her life, she never knew anything except the hunt-and-peck system.
But she could go quite well with that.
[ Chuckles ] NARRATOR: Nelle Harper would share the Underwood with her next door neighbor, a little boy who could also tell a story.
ALICE: Well, here was this little boy next door, here was this little girl, and they played together a lot.
NARRATOR: Between the ages of four and nine, Truman Capote was raised mainly by his mother's relatives in Monroeville and then returned every summer for visits.
Capote went on to write 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' and 'In Cold Blood.'
He is also the real-life model for Dill Harris.
DILL: Folks call me Dill.
WOMAN [ as Lee ]: Dill was a curiosity.
He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt.
His hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duck fluff.
CLARK: The only person Harper Lee says is real is Dill, which was Truman Capote.
SMITH: I can particularly, I think, imagine those two, because they were so different from all the other kids, you know, around them, and what they cared about.
CHILDRESS: Well, Scout was about half boy.
Scout's a real tomboy, you know, and Dill was about half girl, so, you know, the two of them, they were both odd birds in their town.
NARRATOR: Capote's first novel was published in 1948, around the time Lee quit the University of Alabama, stopped studying law, and moved to New York to write.
'Other Voices, Other Rooms' was set in the South and featured a character, Idabel Thompkins, who sounded a little like a tomboy named Nelle.
WOMAN: Hell, I've fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade.
I never think like I'm a girl; you've got to remember that, or we can never be friends.'
NARRATOR: Today in Monroeville, a piece of the stone wall that once divided Nelle Harper Lee's house from Truman Capote's is all that remains.
Capote's family house is now a vacant lot with the remnants of a fish pond and his aunt's camellia bushes.
Next door, Mel's Dairy Dream has taken the place of the Lees' house.
Mr. Lee sold the family home after he lost his wife and son.
Frances Finch Lee died in May of 1951.
Six weeks later, Major Edwin Lee, an army fighter pilot and the father of two, died of an aneurysm in his sleep.
He was 31.
Nelle Harper was 25 and Alice was 40.
ALICE: Mother died and then Ed died.
And Nelle Harper's reaction to sorrow and grief was to stop writing, and for a while she painted.
NARRATOR: But Lee did return to writing.
And the courthouse of her childhood, the centerpiece in her hometown, would become the centerpiece of her novel.
The old courthouse where Mr. Lee once worked has been a museum since 1991.
CLARK: Well, this is the place that all these people come.
And they started coming in 1960 when the book came out.
So, we don't take any credit for the fact that we have 20,000 people visit this town.
We know why they're coming.
We just try to answer their questions about the book and about the town.
Because everybody wants to know, you know, what was real, what wasn't.
CHILDRESS: To me, in a novel, everything is real.
And I really don't care where the author got it, you know?
But I don't know.
For readers, that is important. I understand.
They love to know, like, how much of it was autobiographical.
And I think, you know, for anybody who says they don't write out of their own life is lying.
Of course they do.
All your experience is based out of your own life, but it's -- do you transform the material.
And I think that's what she did and put such magic on it.
CLARK: I do think that she was talking about her town and her family and all the people that she knew here.
My mother was in the same room at school with Harper Lee, coming right by the school, the site of the house of the recluse that becomes Boo Radley, right up that street.
And mama would say things as we would come by.
And she told about Son Boleware who was the boy who was put into the house, and how scared they were of him, how spooky the house was.
GURGANUS: 'Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom.
People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him.
People said he went out at night when the moon was down and peeped in windows.
When people's azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them.
Any stealthy, small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work.'
QUINDLEN: I mean, every kid has had that house in the neighborhood that your friends would dare you to knock at on Halloween.
McBRIDE: Just the whole business of Boo Radley and his house, by the way, is just brilliant stuff, really brilliant stuff -- copied and emulated by writers everywhere.
SMITH: When you think about the pacing and the order of the chapters and the way Boo Radley keeps coming back and coming back and coming back, and, you know, Ewell sneaking around, and everybody's always sneaking around.
I mean, it's an incredibly dramatic book.
It's wonderful.
PATTERSON: I just found the drama just kept building and building and building and you're suspecting something about Boo, which should tell you something about yourself.
Very, very emotional thing -- the suspense was -- was unusual, and really powerful drama that really did hook you, which obviously I try to do with my books.
GURGANUS: 'From the Radley chicken yard, tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the school yard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children.
Radley pecans would kill you.
A baseball hit into the Radley yard was a lost ball and no questions asked.
The misery of that house began many years before Jem and I were born.'
LAMB: I sort of came, over the years, to a realization that, I bet, is true of Harper Lee as well.
You know, you start with who and what you know.
You sort of, like, take a survey of the lay of the land that formed you and shaped you, and then you begin to lie about it.
You tell one lie that turns into a different lie, and after a while, those models sort of lift off and become their own people, rather than the people you originally thought of.
And when you weave an entire network of lies, what you're really doing, if you're aiming to write literary fiction, I think, what you're really doing is, by telling lies, you're trying to arrive at a deeper truth.
[ 'Theme from 'A Summer Place'' plays ] NARRATOR: 'To Kill a Mockingbird' was published on July 11, 1960.
CLARK: Well, when it came out in 1960, I wasn't here.
So, when I started working here, then that's a question we get a lot.
So, I began asking people, 'What did you think,' you know?
And most people said that they didn't pay it any mind.
I asked my mother, and she said, 'Well, it just seemed so familiar, we didn't see anything special about it.'
TUCKER: I didn't know that many people in the white community.
I didn't know their reaction to the book until much later.
But I read the book as soon as it came out, and I got my hands on it.
I was very much impressed.
Not a lot of black people read the book.
YOUNG: I didn't need to read that.
I knew what they were talking about.
For somebody who didn't know, okay.
I had no intellectual curiosity about that.
I had been through that with my wife.
I'd been through that with my father and my grandfather.
It was -- It was too close to me.
Uh... I remember Emmett Till and all of that drama around that.
I mean, I was -- I was a part of the march around Jimmy Lee Jackson's death and the missing -- I mean, the three civil rights workers -- Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney.
There was too much horror around me at the time for me to absorb more.
McBRIDE: What other writer during that time was willing to take on this subject with the kind of honesty and integrity that she did?
What other writer?
McWHORTER: To write a book like this as a Southerner is such an act of protest.
CHILDRESS: We think of this book as sort of being a post-civil rights novel, but it actually was published before the biggest explosions of the Civil Rights Movement and helped bring them on.
♪ Ain't gonna let segregation, Lordy ♪ ♪ Turn me 'round, turn me 'round ♪ ♪ Turn me 'round ♪ TUROW: This was a very brave book to have written when Harper Lee wrote it.
♪ Keep on walkin', yeah ♪ TUROW: And she probably gets zero credit anymore for speaking a truth that people, you know, 1959, 1960, they were not ready to acknowledge.
♪ Which side are you on? ♪ ♪ Which side are you on, boy? ♪ NARRATOR: Schools, buses, restaurants, churches, and neighborhoods all were segregated.
YOUNG: We were aware of...the harshness and brutality of segregation.
Here in Birmingham, you had, for the first time, black people making union wages in the steel mills.
And they began to build nice homes.
Now, these were veterans of service in the military who came back, went to school, got good jobs, started building nice little homes -- nothing fancy -- just little three-bedroom frame houses.
And there were more than 60 of those houses dynamited.
[ Explosions ] 'To Kill a Mockingbird' sort of gave the background of that, but it also gave us hope that justice could prevail.
♪ Oh, Lord ♪ ♪ Keep me alive... ♪ ATTICUS: Tom, will you catch this, please?
Thank you.
Now then, this time, will you please catch it with your left hand?
TOM: I can't, sir.
ATTICUS: Why can't you?
TOM: I can't use my left hand at all.
I got it caught in a cotton gin when I was 12 years old.
All my muscles were tore loose.
[ Spectators murmur ] [ Gavel bangs ] TUROW: 'Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men's hearts, Atticus had no case.
Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.
MAYELLA: I got something to say!
He took advantage of me!
McWHORTER: One of the things that's very powerful and instructive about the book is that even though it's such an indictment of racism, it's not really an indictment of the racist, because there's this understanding there that that was -- that was the normal then.
And for somebody to rebel against that and stand up against that was so exceptional.
ATTICUS: Tom... did you rape Mayella Ewell?
TOM: I did not, sir.
WINFREY: What that took, the kind of courage that took and the kind of, um... inner wisdom and compassion it took for her to understand what it was like to be in somebody else's skin.
She interpreted the feelings of Tom in his dignity and stance in a way that you knew that she had stood in his shoes.
TAYLOR: What is your verdict?
WINFREY: She'd sat in that courtroom inside his skin.
That's pretty remarkable for that time, for little old Harper Lee to have the courage to do that.
That's pretty damn brave.
MAN: Court's now in session. Everybody rise.
MEACHAM: The courageous thing, it seems to me, that Miss Lee did, was end it on a tragic note.
You would think in a novel like this, that sort of achieved this kind of status, that it would be a very melodramatic tale of good and evil.
And instead, it's a tale of good and evil that ends on a note of gray, which is where most of us live.
BRAGG: Young man that grew up on the wrong side of the issue that dominates this book.
Um... they start reading it and the next thing you know it's not just held their interest, it's changed their views.
That's pretty damn... [ Exhales deeply ] That's almost impossible. But it happens.
CHILDRESS: Most white people in the South were not, you know, throwing bombs and causing havoc.
But they had been raised in the system, and I think the book really helped them come to understand what was wrong with the system.
You know, in the way that any numbers of treatises could never do, because it was popular art, because it was told from a child's point of view, you know?
ATTICUS: You just learn a single trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks.
You never really understand a person... CASH: '...until you consider things from his point of view.'
Sir?
Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.'
ATTICUS: Scout, you know what a compromise is?
CASH: This beautiful intimacy between Atticus and Scout that you just want to get inside, and that gives you so much a feeling of love and comfort and integrity.
It's, uh... It never -- Its beauty never ceases to amaze me and strike me.
RUSSO: Something about that father-daughter relationship aided me in writing all of my father-daughter stuff, all my family stuff.
That is a quintessential American family, even though it's not typical.
TUROW: Not only is Atticus this wonderful father -- completely intuitive and caring, and, uh... you know, but he's even the best shot in the county.
[ Dog barking ] TATE: Take 'em, Mr. Finch.
QUINDLEN: 'Mr. Tate handed the rifle to Atticus.
Jem and I nearly fainted.
He walked quickly, but I thought he moved like an underwater swimmer.
Time had slowed to a nauseating crawl.
When Atticus raised his glasses, Calpurnia murmured, 'Sweet Jesus, help him.'' It's just, from a writer's point of view, it's a perfect evocation of a moment in time.
You are utterly there, standing on the porch, watching him, and feeling the children's amazement that once again there's a part of their father that they don't know or understand and almost can't believe exists.
TATE: What's the matter, boy? Can't you talk?
Didn't you know your daddy's the best shot in this county?
ATTICUS: Oh, hush, Heck.
BROKAW: I was particularly taken when Scout went to him after she had been taunted at school.
SCOUT: Atticus, do you defend niggers?
BROKAW: You can see him working his way through why he was gonna take this case, and he couldn't hold his head up unless he took this case.
And the conversation between the two of them is sophisticated in its own way, and yet it's still between a father and a daughter.
ATTICUS: I'm simply defending a Negro -- Tom Robinson.
And, Scout, there are some things that you're not old enough to understand just yet.
There's been... some high talk around town to the effect that I shouldn't do much... BROKAW: ''...that I shouldn't do much about defending this man.'
'If you shouldn't be defending him, then why are you doing it?'
'Well, for a number of reasons,' said Atticus.
'The main one is, if I didn't I couldn't hold up my head in town.
I couldn't represent this county in the legislature, I couldn't even tell you or Jem...'' ATTICUS: ...not to do something again.
BROKAW: ''You mean, if you didn't defend that man, Jem and me wouldn't have to mind you anymore?'
'That's about right.' 'Why?'
'Well, because I could never ask you to mind me again.
Scout, simply by the nature of the work, every lawyer gets at least one case in his lifetime that affects him personally.'' Well, you know, the small town, the personal relationships, the place of a lawyer, the place of race in the South, is all encapsulated in that, and again, he wasn't mounting some altar to give her a sermon.
YOUNG: For me, he represents a generation of intelligent white lawyers who eventually, in the '50s and '60s, became the federal judges that changed the South.
Really, without them, we would not have had a Civil Rights Movement.
McBRIDE: Atticus Finch was a citizen in a town who saw wrong and moved to right it, despite what his neighbors thought.
It was beyond him trying to do the right thing.
It was about -- He knew God was watching, and so he was trying to get to heaven.
TUROW: He's everything -- he is a paragon beyond paragons.
And, yeah, it's true that there aren't many human beings in the world like Atticus Finch, perhaps none, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth striving to be like him.
TAYLOR: Will the defendant please rise and face the jury?
What is your verdict?
MAN: We find the defendant guilty as charged.
ATTICUS: I'll go to see Helen first thing tomorrow morning.
Tom.
WINFREY: 'Atticus took his coat off the back of his chair and pulled it over his shoulder.
Then he left the courtroom, but not by his usual exit.
He must have wanted to go home the short way, because he walked quickly down the middle aisle toward the south exit.
I followed to the top of his head as he made his way to the door.
He did not look up.
Someone was punching me, but I was reluctant to take my eyes from the people below us and from the image of Atticus' lonely walk down the aisle.
'Miss Jean Louise?'
I looked around.
They were standing all around us and in the balcony on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet.
Reverend Sykes' voice was as distant as Judge Taylor's.
'Miss Jean Louise...'' SYKES: Miss Jean Lousie, stand up.
WINFREY: ''...stand up. Your father's passing.'' I just love that.
MAN: How did you originally get the idea of doing this particular subject?
CAPOTE: I was just thumbing through and way in the back part of I saw this small item, and was later on that day talking to Harper Lee, who's a great, great friend of mine, who wrote 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' and she was very interested in reportage.
NARRATOR: 'To Kill a Mockingbird' was finished but not yet published when Harper Lee decided to help out her old friend.
She went to Kansas with him to do some reporting for what he was calling his nonfiction novel and would later become 'In Cold Blood.'
More than 30 years later, those trips became the subject of two movies.
By then, Capote had been dead for a decade and Harper Lee was nearly 80.
CAPOTE: Nelle, as my oldest and dearest friend, do you think the Kansas thing is good?
LEE: Are you joking? That small-town stuff?
That suspicion, that gossip?
That is your world as much as this, maybe even more.
Mm. How were they killed?
CAPOTE: Shotgun.
SMITH: Imagine them being so supportive of each other's work.
And I think particularly, Harper Lee being so supportive of Truman Capote's work, and going out when he was writing 'In Cold Blood' and doing all this stuff to help him -- you can't help but wonder what would she have been writing if she wasn't helping him so much.
I think she must have been a very nurturing and caring friend, perhaps more caring, less damaged than he was, you know, because he was certainly damaged.
GURGANUS: I knew Capote late in his life in the old Studio 54 days.
[ Disco music playing ] And at that time, he was near the end of his sociability, and he and Liza Minnelli and Halston and Liz Taylor and all the gang were there.
And he had a big fedora on a little bitty man.
He was usually just totally stoned, and he was like a puff adder -- I don't even know what a puff adder is, but that phrase made sense -- And he groped me and all the other boys in that place.
He was like a little monkey going from vine to vine, just... And, of course, I mean, for me, at that age, I was just beginning to be published in and various places, and I knew who he was, obviously.
But for me, he was a kind of object lesson in what not to become -- even though we were partying at the same place, I felt very distanced from him and very sad that he would be publicly seen that stoned and that foolish.
And I'm glad to say that, except for six or eight times, I've tried to avoid that trap myself.
McWHORTER: And what are the odds of two people like Truman Capote and Nelle Harper Lee coming out of a tiny little town like that?
How amazing that they would have the shared history.
And then just the incredible contrast between this person who has become the conscience of the country, and Truman Capote, who was probably a sociopath.
It is phenomenal when you think about it.
MURPHY: And they remained friends through life?
ALICE: No.
NARRATOR: According to Alice Lee, the friendship foundered after 'To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize.
Ironically, it had been Capote who set Lee on her course toward 'To Kill a Mockingbird' when he wrote to Michael Brown from Tangiers to ask if he would look after a shy friend from Alabama.
MICHAEL: Out of the blue came a letter from Truman, very short letter written in very tiny little handwriting, saying, 'I have a friend who's coming to New York.
Would you kindly look after her? Her name is Nelle Harper Lee.'
Had she been a dreadful person, I would have, out of comradeship, have looked after her as best I could.
NARRATOR: Michael Brown's friendship with Lee would last forever.
Not Capote's -- his envy got in the way.
ALICE: Truman became very jealous because Nelle Harper got a Pulitzer and he did not.
He expected 'In Cold Blood' to bring him one, and it did not, and his anger grew up, and, you know, he got involved with the drugs and heavy drinking and all, and that was it.
It was not Nelle Harper dropping him, it was Truman going away from her.
MAN [ as Capote ]: 'She is so involved in the publicity for her film -- she owns a percentage, that's why -- even so, I think it's very undignified for any serious artist to be exploited in this fashion.'
INTERVIEWER: 'To Kill a Mockingbird' was made into what I thought was an unusually fine motion picture with much of the integrity of the book held.
How did you feel about it?
LEE: I felt the same way.
As a matter of fact, I have nothing but gratitude to the people who made the film.
I went out and looked at them filming a little of it.
There was a feeling of such kindness, or such -- such -- It seemed to me to be such respect for the material that they were working with.
It seemed to permeate everyone who had anything to do with the film.
Of course I was delighted.
I was touched. I was happy. I was exceedingly grateful.
NARRATOR: The movie 'To Kill a Mockingbird' was a masterpiece all its own.
A young actor named Robert Duvall made his screen debut without saying a word.
Casting agent Boaty Boatwright combed the South to find the right children and hit pay dirt in Birmingham.
BOATWRIGHT: I started interviewing and Mary walked in, and she was just adorable.
And she was wearing jeans and a little striped t-shirt.
I said, 'Mary, you're just so cute.'
I said, 'how old are you?'
And she said, 'Nine.'
Very Southern, and I said, 'Well, you look younger and smaller than nine.'
And I never will forget she looked at me and she said, 'Well, if you drank as much butter-- buttermilk and smoked as many corn silks as I do, you might be smaller, too.'
So, I figured right away, so I called Alan and I said, 'I found a perfect Scout.'
And then we found -- I found Phillip Alford the same day.
It was just miraculous serendipity.
I think at the time, Rock Hudson was the big star at Universal, and he certainly pushed to play Atticus.
I'm sure knowing Rock, he had the intelligence and good taste of his own not to [Laughs] fight for it.
I think originally it was offered to Spencer Tracy, and he couldn't do it.
And Gregory.
Well, he just -- That was the perfect Atticus.
BADHAM: Yeah, he was my Atticus. He'll always be Atticus.
He was so wonderful.
It was just playtime. We had a blast.
Bob Mulligan was one of the best directors ever.
Like, especially with me.
He would squat down and get right, you know, eye to eye and he'd talk to me like an adult.
I don't ever remember him talking to us like children.
He would sometimes just set up the scene for us.
'The camera's gonna be here. You're gonna be here.
We're gonna move this way.
And then you are to take a line this way.'
And how I delivered the lines was left to me, as I could do them on the fly.
SCOUT: What in the Sam Hill are you doing -- BADHAM: I think it shows when you look at the footage now.
It was brilliant.
SCOUT: No, me, me, me!
JEM: Oh, let her be first.
BADHAM: And the other thing was the tire scene.
What you don't see is, off to the side, there was this big utility truck, and evidently we'd had one of our disagreements that morning and the boys had decided they'd had about enough of me and they were just gonna kill me and do away with it, you know, not have to deal with this anymore.
And they took the tire and pushed it as hard as they could right into that utility truck.
So, after that, Bob Mulligan put a stunt double in the tire.
NARRATOR: Art director Henry Bumstead created Maycomb on a studio back lot with an exact replica of the Monroeville courthouse and won an Academy Award, as did Horton Foote for the screenplay and Gregory Peck for the role that would define him for the rest of his life.
PECK: Thank you, Harper Lee.
NARRATOR: The movie amplified the novel and rode the wave of the Civil Rights Movement.
♪ Get your rights, Jack ♪ ♪ And don't be a Tom no more, no more, no more, no more ♪ ♪ Take a ride, Jack ♪ ♪ And don't be a Tom no more ♪ ♪ More ♪ ♪ More ♪ WOMAN: I'm sorry, but we don't serve colored folks in here!
If you want something, I'll give it to you in the back and let you go back where you came from.
NARRATOR: Activists had begun boarding interstate buses in the North and riding them into the deep South to challenge segregation laws, and were often met with violence.
♪ No more ♪ NARRATOR: The same day these pictures were taken on the Lees' front porch, these were taken in nearby Anniston.
The debut novelist was now being put on the spot, asked to comment on the biggest domestic issue of the day.
REPORTER: What do you think of the Freedom Riders?
WOMAN [ as Lee ]: I don't think this business of getting on buses and flaunting state laws does much of anything except getting a lot of publicity and violence.
I think Reverend King and the NAACP are going about it in exactly the right way.
[ People singing indistinctly ] The people in the South may not like it, but they respect it.
NARRATOR: The city of Birmingham, 200 miles north of Monroeville, was at the center of Civil Rights battle.
WALLACE: In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.
McWHORTER: When I started researching my book and I was going through the newspapers, looking at the spring of '63, which was, of course, when, you know, Martin Luther King came to Birmingham, led the demonstrations that ended up leading to the end of segregation in America -- and with the police dogs and the fire hoses attacking the young children and everything.
And I was leafing through the newspapers, the local newspapers, and I saw the movie ads for 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' and I thought, 'Wow, that's when that was?'
NARRATOR: Growing up in Birmingham, Diane McWhorter was a classmate of Mary Badham's.
And so the entire fifth grade of the Brooke Hill School for Girls went to the premiere.
McWHORTER: I remember watching it, first assuming that Atticus was gonna get Tom Robinson off because Tom Robinson was innocent and Atticus was played by Gregory Peck, and of course he's gonna win.
And then, as it dawned on me that it wasn't gonna happen, you know, I started getting upset about that.
And then I start getting really upset about being upset, because by, you know, rooting for a black man, you are kind of betraying every principle that you had been raised to believe.
And I remember thinking that, what would my father think if he saw me fighting back these tears when Tom Robinson gets shot.
It was a really disturbing experience -- to be crying for a black man was so taboo that, um, you know.
It made me confront the difficulty that Southerners have in going against people that they love.
BADHAM: The messages are so clear and so simple.
It's a way of life, it's a way of thinking about life and getting along with one another and learning tolerance.
Racism and bigotry haven't gone anywhere.
Ignorance hasn't gone anywhere.
This is not a black and white, America 1930s issue.
These are issues that are global.
TUROW: We may live eventually in a world where that kind of race prejudice is unimaginable.
And people may read this story in 300 years and go, 'So what was the big deal?'
But the fact of the matter is, in today's America, it still speaks a fundamental truth.
TUCKER: The attitudes that were there in the '30s, they have not all changed.
So, yes, it is relevant.
NARRATOR: Harper Lee's last full interview was in March of 1964.
REPORTER: What have you been working on since 'To Kill a Mockingbird' appeared?
LEE: I am working on another novel, and like 'Mockingbird,' it goes very slowly.
I am a slow worker. I'm a... I think a steady worker.
You know, so many writers don't like to write.
They must, they do it under the compulsion that makes any artist what he is.
But they really don't enjoy trying to turn a thought into a reasonable sentence.
But I do, I like to write, and sometimes I'm afraid that I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don't want to leave it.
NARRATOR: That summer, Lee rented a house on Fire Island, right near the Browns.
JOY: She was just -- Always stopped by every day.
She was a big fisherwoman.
And she'd go down to the dock, and she'd fish.
Spent a lot of time fishing down there, and became great pals with Captain Al, who ran the ferries, because he was a big fisherman.
She made a nice life for herself in Saltaire that summer.
But she was doing research, and then, that went on, I think, for several years.
How long, I don't know.
But then, even that drifted away.
She wasn't doing that kind of research anymore.
MICHAEL: It was in her to be a writer.
All from the top she was going to be a writer.
And she became a very successful one.
But to start with a major work is automatically to put a damper on what you do from then on.
BOATWRIGHT: I can still see her sitting in Alan's living room, when we all used to gather, laughing, talking, drinking, and have a good time.
And she was wildly funny, witty and smart.
And she certainly did not suffer fools lightly.
And of course one kept hoping and waiting for the next novel.
NARRATOR: Decades passed.
Harper Lee lived in New York City, returning to Monroeville for long visits with her family.
She did not grant interviews.
MICHAEL: Press was not her friend.
It just created more publicity, more people after her for something.
I wish it had been two-thirds as successful, and that she could have had a little -- That she could have enjoyed it.
I don't think she's enjoyed fame.
ALICE: But as time went on, she said that reporters began to take too many liberties with what she said.
So, she just wanted out.
And she started that, and did not break her rule.
She felt like she'd given enough.
CHILDRESS: It takes a kind of courage that almost nobody has to turn away from the church of publicity and say, 'I'm not going pray there.
I'm not going to appear there. I don't want my picture.'
It's a kind of blasphemy in this society.
ALICE: Her attitude was the kind of recognition that was coming out was the kind that was placed on entertainers who promoted it for their business reasons.
She did not think that a writer needed to be recognized in person.
CHILDRESS: She had the great freedom of being able to live off the proceeds of her book, which most writers don't have, so, you know, that liberated her to be able to do that.
If the book had sold 4,000 copies, I bet she'd have been out there hustling, just like the rest of us, you know?
QUINDLEN: Can you imagine the pressure on Harper Lee to write a sequel to 'To Kill a Mockingbird'? I mean, it must have just -- Once the movie came out and you could see that it kept selling every year, they just must have thrown rose petals and chocolates and millions of dollars at her feet.
And I don't know whether she couldn't do it, but I prefer to think she wouldn't do it.
NARRATOR: And she didn't.
'Go Set a Watchman' was written first and features many of the same characters, but is set some 20 years later.
Atticus is aging, and a grown-up Scout is now strictly Jean Louise, 26, living and working in New York City, just as Harper Lee once did.
MORRISON: She writes, 'She's on the train traveling back to Maycomb.
When she dressed, she put on her Maycomb clothes: gray slacks, a black sleeveless blouse, white socks and loafers.
Although it was four hours away, she could hear her aunt sniff of disapproval.'
JOY: The wit is wonderful in 'Watchman,' and the humor and the bit of, uh... Just sly observations, which tickle me to death.
NARRATOR: In the novel, Jean Louise continues to buck tradition, refusing to marry her suitor, a young lawyer in her father's firm, and refusing to accept the resistance to integration she finds in her town and in her own family.
MORRISON: We can all relate to leaving our families and coming back for the first time and seeing the world that we grew up in in a very different light.
And I think that's certainly what Nelle was experiencing when she wrote the book.
The book is about what life was like for women in the '50s, certainly in the South.
It's a book about race. It's a book about religion.
It's a book about politics. It's a book about family.
NARRATOR: And it's a book that will appear exactly as it was written all those years ago.
MORRISON: We asked Nelle if she wanted to edit the book and she declined.
We've told her that we don't really think it needed editing.
I mean, it is, really, a complete, beautifully told story that I think readers are gonna just love for generations to come.
JOY: If now an editor had come in and made suggestions, it would not have reflected the Harper Lee who was the writer in the 1950s.
NARRATOR: Joy Brown has visited her old friend several times since 'Go Set a Watchman' was rediscovered.
JOY: Oh, she has all her marbles, let me tell you.
Nelle is all for its being published.
She was delighted.
Her first reaction was absolute surprise, and now she's just delighted with the whole idea.
It's going to turn up with a lot of baggage.
And we all know that, and we expect it.
And it will be interesting.
And it's not gonna matter, because it is what it is.
Historically, 'Watchman' is what it is.
NARRATOR: And now, maybe, once again, this really is all she wrote.
But it's clear from a letter to her friends and benefactors that Harper Lee was, at one time, planning much, much more.
JOY: This is a letter from the fall of 1958.
Saying 'dears,' meaning Michael and myself.
'I have my work cut out for me for the next 15 years.
(1) Race Novel, (2) Victorian Novel' -- she and I both loved the 19th century, particularly English history and literature -- '(3) What Mr. Graham Greene calls An Entertainment.
(4) I'm gonna tear Monroeville to pieces, (1958 Monroeville). (5) A Novel of The United Nations.
(6) India, 1910.
Can you feed and lodge me so long?
Much love, Nelle.'
LEE: Well, my objectives are very limited.
I simply want to do the best I can with the talent that God gave me, I suppose.
I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly -- and that is small-town, middle-class Southern life.
There is something universal in it.
There's something decent to be said for it, and there's something to lament when it goes, in its passing.
In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of South Alabama.
NARRATOR: But by the 1970s, and without another book out, a persistent and untraceable rumor developed that Truman Capote had something to do with the writing of 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
McWHORTER: There is no way that Truman could have written that book without taking credit for it on every 'Dick Cavett Show' that he ever appeared on -- aside from the fact that it just does not sound like Truman at all.
Um, you know, it's -- He's not as funny as she is.
CAPOTE: I have my own little secrets.
CAVETT: Not too many, I would think, by this time.
JOY: It was in galleys when they went to Kansas.
And it was finished, other than whatever you correct in galleys.
She showed him 'Mockingbird' one time.
And he commented on it.
So, he never laid eyes on it, other than that one time.
CHILDRESS: I got a letter from her one time that absolutely proved to me she wrote every word of 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' 'cause it's absolutely -- the voice is completely the voice of the book.
And it's the most beautifully, elegantly written letter, and so I know that people are lying when they say that.
MURPHY: Did she keep writing?
ALICE: Yes and no.
She didn't put herself under the burden of writing like she did when she was doing 'Mockingbird.'
But she continued to write something.
She says you couldn't top what she had done.
And she told one of our cousins who asked her, she said, 'I haven't anywhere to go but down.'
McBRIDE: Maybe for Harper Lee there was nothing else to play.
She sang the song, she played the solo, and she walked off the stage.
And we're all the better for it.
I mean, we're very grateful to her for what she's -- the amount of love that she's given us.
TUROW: Hemingway said that all writers really tell one story, so maybe she felt she told the story she had to tell.
I don't know.
I mean, uh, of course it's a frightening thing to another novelist to see somebody write a book that good and then shut up.
SMITH: It's just astonishing to me to be able to write like this and then to stop.
I bet she hadn't.
I bet she's sneaking around doing it.
[ Laughs ] I bet she's sitting in her house like Boo Radley, writing.
[ Laughs ] KIPEN: Oh, absolutely, I think she's Boo Radley.
People think she's Scout, and she's Boo Radley.
TATE: To my way of thinking... KIPEN: '...taking the one man who's done you and this town a great service and dragging him with his shy ways into the limelight, to me that's a sin.
It's a sin and I'm not about to have it on my head.
If it was any other man it'd be different, but not this man, Mr. Finch.'
That's Harper Lee, and it would be a sin to drag her in the limelight.
WINFREY: I remember it was a rainy day in New York and we were having, um -- we were going to have lunch at the Four Seasons, and what do you serve Harper Lee?
'Aah!'
We were like instant girlfriends.
It was just wonderful.
And I loved being with her and knew, you know, 20 minutes into the conversation that I would never be able to convince her to do an interview.
What she said to me was, is that, 'You know the character Boo Radley?'
And she said, 'Well, then, if you know Boo, then you understand why I wouldn't be doing an interview, because I'm really Boo.'
So, that's all she had to say to me.
Okay.
SCOUT: Why, there he is, Mr. Tate.
He can tell ya his name.
BROKAW: And there, standing in the shadows, is this mysterious neighbor.
And she turns and says... SCOUT: Hey, Boo.
ATTICUS: Miss Jean Louise, Mr. Arthur Radley.
BROKAW: I just love that moment.
The connection between the two of them.
QUINDLEN: Two of the best words that have ever been put into any book by any writer -- 'Hey, Boo.'
I mean, there -- It's like there's moments in books that make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, and 'Hey, Boo' is one of those moments.
BADHAM: Oh, yeah.
'Neighbors bring food with death, and flowers with sickness, and little things in between.
Boo was our neighbor.
He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good luck pennies, and our lives.'
SMITH: And I think to give us an experience of the other, to make us see that people so radically different from us are okay and can be helpful and wonderful, you know, and are just not like us, and that's okay.
ATTICUS: Thank you, Arthur.
Thank you for my children.
SMITH: 'I slipped my hand into the crook of his arm.
He had to stoop a little to accommodate me, but if Miss Stephanie Crawford was watching from her upstairs window, she would see Arthur Radley escorting me down the sidewalk as any gentleman would do.
We came to the streetlight on the corner and I wondered how many times Dill had stood there hugging the fat pole, watching, waiting, hoping to see him.
I wondered how many times Jem and I had made this journey, but I entered the Radley front gate for the second time in my life.
Boo and I walked up the steps to the porch.
His fingers found the front doorknob.
He gently released my hand, opened the door, went inside, and shut the door behind him.
I never saw him again.'
Isn't that wonderful, when he escorts her home?
I just, uh... Okay.
To learn more about Harper Lee and other American Masters, visit pbs.org/americanmasters or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.
'Hey, Boo' is available on DVD.
The companion book -- 'Scout, Atticus & Boo' -- is also available.
To order, visit shopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
