Reviewed by LiDoña Wagner

To Kill a Mockingbird won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961, was made into an award-winning movie in 1962 and is a perennial bestseller, drawing almost a million readers annually. A survey in 1991 showed that the book is ranked second only to the Bible “as making a difference in people’s lives.” And, it is the only book ever written by Harper Lee. Yet, in contrast to her close friend Truman Capote, for whom she did much of the research for his classic In Cold Blood, Nelle Harper Lee shuns the limelight.  

Leading the self-selected life of a recluse in Monroeville, Alabama, Harper Lee provided no assistance to biographer Charles Shields and did not respond to numerous requests for interviews or corroboration of facts. Nonetheless, Shields, a former teacher, reporter for public radio, journalist and author of several nonfiction books for young people, persisted. He based his biography on six hundred interviews and other communications with Harper Lee’s friends, associates and former classmates along with assiduous research in the archives of Truman Capote, the papers of her literary agent, national and local libraries and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles.

Mockingbird begins with a flash-forward to the launch of To Kill a Mockingbird. From the opening scenes of a distracted Lee snarling New York traffic, to years later when she reveals herself to a restaurant waiter in the Big Apple, Shields succeeds in presenting a vivid picture of the woman who defied her father by dropping out of law school and moving to New York to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a writer .

Shields uses Lee’s lifelong friendship with Truman Capote as a dominant thematic thread, weaving together the ambitions that drove Lee to write with empathy and compassion about her hero father and bigoted hometown as well as her reticence to become fodder for the pulp media. Capote is the foil that illuminates a decidedly different Harper Lee.

Mockingbird is the tale of how a moving story written from the heart took over the life of its author, pulling her in directions that prevented her from the other writing she had in mind. It is a marvelous read and highly recommended for those who aspire to writing literary nonfiction.