Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

Cep provides an overview of the early lives of Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Lee spent her childhood in Monroeville, Alabama, mostly unsupervised; she filled her days with making up and later writing stories with her best friend Truman Capote. Lee learned to read early and was something of a misfit because of her intelligence and refusal to embrace traditional women’s norms. Lee initially followed her family’s wishing by going to college, but she dropped out of law school six weeks before graduation because she wanted to get down to the business of becoming a professional writer.

Truman Capote spent his early years living next door to the Lee family. Like Lee, he was a precocious misfit. His lisp, short stature, and gender presentation (he was gay and out later in his life) made him stand out. Capote moved to New York after his mother divorced, but he continued to spend summers in Monroeville. His path diverged from Lee’s because he chose to pursue his career as a writer immediately after high school instead of going to college. As Lee went through college, Capote worked as a writer and hobnobbed with celebrities in the United States and Europe. By 1949, he was “already well on his way to becoming an international celebrity” (163).

Capote thrived during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He published The Grass Harp in 1951, a work that drew heavily on his Southern childhood with Lee. He alternated between time abroad and time in New York. Lee also lived in New York by then, but her life was far from easy. Lee’s mother died suddenly of cancer in 1951. As Lee’s father aged, Lee traveled back and forth between New York and Monroeville to care for him. She felt suffocated while in Alabama, but she had become obsessed with the idea of writing about her childhood there. Her work as a ticket agent, socialization with her friends, and the many distractions of New York City stood in her way, however.

In December 1956 Lee’s close friend Michael Brown and his wife gave her a gift of money intended to buy her a year of time off to write. Lee used this time to write several stories that convinced the Annie Laurie Williams Agency to represent her. Lee worked closely with Maurice Crain, an agency editor, to complete the rough draft of Go Set a Watchmen, a novel about Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, an enlightened Southern woman who returns to the South and is disappointed when her father, Atticus Finch, opposes integration despite his early support for civil rights. With Crain guiding her, Lee wrote swiftly. In May Lee began incorporating the short stories into a draft of a second novel, which was called The Long Goodbye at the time.

By June 1956, Tay Hohoff, a J.B. Lippincott editor, was interested enough in what she saw to begin work with Lee. Hohoff encouraged Lee to combine her two novel drafts, a frustrating process that became easier once Crain told her to focus to the perspective of Scout Finch, the young narrator of The Long Goodbye, and to make Atticus a more uncomplicated hero by taking out his questionable racial politics. These changes convinced Hohoff to buy the manuscript for the novel. The $1,000 advance was a great deal of money for Lee. The hard work was still ahead, however.

Hohoff insisted that Lee needed to make the changes suggested by Crain. In the end, Lee skipped entirely over the issue of civil rights by setting the novel in the 1930s. She added in the adult point of view of a grown-up Scout as a retrospective frame for the central narrative, the story of how young Scout lost her innocence over two momentous years during her childhood. In this version of the story, Atticus, Scout’s father, is completely heroic. This draft became Harper’s masterwork To Kill a Mockingbird, and Go Set a Watchmen was set aside as a flawed zero draft.

After handing over the manuscript, Lee accepted an offer to accompany Capote to Holcombe, Kansas, as a research assistant. Capote was doing a piece for The New Yorker on the murder of members of the Clutter family. Lee proved to be an invaluable assistant to Capote. Her notes provided important material and observations that set Capote up for success as he began writing.

By then it was obvious that Capote was much more intrigued with the murderers than the victims. He decided to write what would become In Cold Blood, a best-selling book that Capote called a “nonfiction novel” (188). Capote and Lee took the train back to New York, and Capote had a book deal from Random House not long after.

When Lee returned to New York, she got a nicer apartment with her advance check and began editing her novel. Capote couldn’t wrap up his book until the appeals of the Clutters’ murderers ended. While he waited for the resolution of the case, Lee finally outstripped him with the publication and success of To Kill a Mockingbird.

To Kill a Mockingbird was an enormous success. A best-seller, it gained Lee the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, went on to become a blockbuster film, and was a selection for Reader’s Digest Books. It made Lee a lot of money because Annie Laurie Williams had negotiated a great contract. Lee was never happy with this success, however. She hated the high taxes she had to pay, was hounded incessantly by fans and the press, and found that the distractions of promoting her work and giving interviews prevented her from writing.

Lee wrote only slight pieces in the year after publishing the novel, despite pressure from her agent and editors to begin work on her next book. She began refusing to do interviews. She also refused to cast the novel as a commentary on the struggle for civil rights. In Lee’s mind the freedom riders and protesters were disruptive people who did more harm than good to their cause.

The years after the publication of the novel were also marked by a series of personal tragedies. A. C., Lee’s father, finally died in 1962. Maurice Crain died in 1970. Harper’s agent retired in 1971, and Hohoff died as well in 1974. Lee turned inward and became known as a depressed, erratic drinker who could never produce that next work despite the amount of time she spent writing.

At a party of attendees at the 1976 Democratic National Convention, Lee met Tom Radney. In 1977 he told her about Willie Maxwell. Lee decided that her next work would be a true-crime book about the strange events in Alexander City. After more than 20 years in New York, Lee returned home to begin research.