The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee by Marja Mills Read Free Book Online Page A

England.
    Both she and Alice were fascinated with English history and English literature. Their own English roots went deep, back to the barons of Runnymede, the feudal landowners who made history by forcing King John to accept the Magna Carta, limiting his powers, in 1215. The more Nelle and Alice learned about British history, the more theywanted to know. It was true when they studied it in high school and college, and it was true in the decades of personal reading that followed. Alice’s research into the family’s origins led her to believe they also had an ancestor who, four hundred years later, was one of the scholars to help translate the King James Version of the Christian Bible for the Church of England. Nelle believed this translation to be simply the best, hands down, no argument.
    After Oxford, Nelle returned to her legal studies in Tuscaloosa but left a semester before she would have gotten her degree. The philosophy and human drama of law interested her. The dry technicalities did not. Alice recalled, “She got an itch to write.”
    Or, rather, to devote herself to writing. She had dabbled in it before, starting with the stories she and Truman made up as children. At the University of Alabama, she wrote for and edited the Rammer Jammer, a student humor magazine. Like Alice, she was also a lifelong correspondent. “Her letters,” her friend Tom later told me, “are like short stories. Her powers of description are extraordinary.”
    And so the dark-haired young woman was off to New York, at age twenty-three, to a walk-up, cold-water flat and a job as an airline reservations clerk. It was several years before she was able to quit that job and start writing full time, in a turn of events worthy of an O. Henry short story. On Christmas Day in 1956, Harper Lee was spending the holiday at the home of her friends Joy and Michael Brown. She found an envelope addressed to her on the tree in their living room. Inside was a simple message: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”
    Lee wrote about that turning point, calling it “a full, fair chance for a new life,” in the December 1961 edition of McCall’s magazine. “I went to the window, stunned by the day’s miracle,” she wrote. “Our faith in you was really all I had heard them say. I would do my best notto fail them.” They meant it to be a gift, but she insisted on repaying them. The Browns remained lifelong friends and a surrogate family in New York. When Nelle went to the White House in 2007 to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Browns were in attendance.
    Nelle extended the same kind of gift to many others. Alice told me her sister gave very generous sums to charities, behind the scenes, and I came to learn she had educated many people who never knew she was their benefactor. She preferred to do her charitable giving quietly. Some of it was distributed through the Methodist Church. Other regular contributions went, quietly, to local charities and other organizations. But that came later. When she moved to New York, she had little money and lived frugally. Even after the unexpected success of her book, she still lived frugally when it came to spending on herself. In Monroeville, she bought clothing at the local Walmart and the Vanity Fair outlet. In Manhattan, she took taxis on occasion but mostly rode the bus.
    Lee’s initial efforts, living in New York in the 1950s, were short stories. Then, at the suggestion of her literary agent, Maurice Crain, she expanded one of them into what would become To Kill a Mockingbird. For a time, the title was simply Atticus. She wrote the novel in Manhattan and Monroeville, where she spent time helping out after her father fell ill. When she had first submitted the novel to J. B. Lippincott Company, she was asked to rewrite it. It was finally published in June 1960. She expected the work to be met with “a quick and merciful death at the hands of the