5 Books By Or About Harper Lee You Want to Read Right Now

 

 

 

"Go Set a Watchman" by Harper Lee

The recent discovery of Harper Lee's manuscript Go Set a Watchman -- which predated Mockingbird -- has spawned numerous conversations about the relationship between it and Mockingbird.  

 

 

Go Set a Watchman is told in the third person. Scout is now an adult and is known by her real name, Jean Louise. And surprisingly, Atticus is a racist, and not the justice-serving attorney we've adored for years. Changes like these have surprised Mockingbird fans, but we should consider Watchman as an early draft of Mockingbird rather than a separate book.

 

 Watchman was the original manuscript Lee offered her Lippincott editor Tay Hohoff, who advised Lee to rewrite Watchman from Scout's point of view and in first person. This Lee did with Mockingbird. 

It is best, then, to look at Watchman as a writing exercise that prepared Lee for Mockingbird -- and not as a prequel -- but as a look at how Lee was trying on the central themes of racism and hypocrisy, which she then perfectly worked out with Mockingbird.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

 

 

Jean Louise Finch, the 6-year-old narrator known as Scout, takes the reader on a very adult adventure seen from Scout's eyes and told in straightforward language accessible to middle school readers through adult readers. 

 

Let's not be fooled, however, by the easy-to-follow narrative technique.

 

Mockingbird's issues were dead center in the American civil rights issues of the era in which Mockingbird was published -- just as they were front and center in the novel's setting. 

 

Mockingbird was set in 1933 during the middle of the Depression. Racism was stark and life was strictly segregated -- both in Mockingbird  and in the real life of that era. Scout takes the reader on a journey of small town life, and then into the Ewell-Robinson trial, in which the black man Tom Robinson is accused of raping the young Mayella Ewell. 

 

Atticus defends Robinson and presents clear evidence why Robinson could not have raped Mayella, but Atticus knows justice will not be served that day, and Robinson is killed when he tries to escape from a prison farm.  

 

Mockingbird is more than a searing tale of prejudice. It's a story about seeing people for who they really are. Besides seeing the townspeople's true colors and Tom Robinson's true colors, Scout, her brother Jem and their neighbor Dill learn who and what Boo Radley is all about -- a gentle, surprising man -- and not the bogeyman in the gossip that circulated about him.

"The Mockingbird Next Door" by Marja Mills

 

 

  Nelle Harper Lee has shied away from reporters, but in 2001,  Chicago Tribune journalist Marja Mills was fortunate to interview Harper Lee in Lee's Alabama hometown of Monroeville when Mockingbird was selected as the book for Chicago's "One Book, One Chicago" award. Mills interviewed Nelle Harper's sister Alice and then got word that Nelle wanted to meet with Mills herself. 

 

That early bond created a rare trust between Mills and Lee -- and it was this early trust, Mills says -- that enabled her to get close to Lee to research this book, which took the better part of a decade. 

 

Mills even rented a house next to Lee's for two years. Mills interviewed and met many townspeople,  took copious notes and recorded thousands of pages of transcripts about Lee, about the book and about Monroeville, the real-life setting for the fictional Mockingbird town of Maycomb, Alabama.  

 

The reader even meets Nelle Harper's lawyer-sister Alice before Alice died in 2014 at 103. 

 

The world has been clamoring for more, more, more about Harper Lee -- and Mills' book is exactly that.

"Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee" by Charles J. Shields

 

 

 

This is an extremely well- researched book about Lee -- and not simply another book written about Lee with whom the author did not have direct contact. 

 

Shields did interview and correspond with some 600 of Lee's friends and acquaintances and then pieced together a comprehensive biography of Lee's life -- from Lee's early life; her mother's emotional difficulties; her life with next door neighbor Truman Capote (the real-life model behind Mockingbird character Dill); Lee's unhappy life in a woman's college; her college journalism career; her brief time in law school; her months at Oxford and her early years in New York where she worked first as a bookseller then as an airline reservations agent until she met Michael and Joy Brown -- who then gifted her with the equivalent of one year's salary so she could quit her job and write. 

 

There are so many fascinating facts that complete this biography about which readers  did not know and which Shields has pieced together for the reader.

"I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee" by Charles J. Shields

 

 Here, Shields has adapted his longer book (above) for middle- to high-school readers. As with Shields' adult book, Shields did not have any direct contact with Lee, but the amount of research and facts are perfect for the middle- to high-school reader interested in finding out about Lee and her early life.