Harper Lee
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What Could Have Been
For the New York Times, Alexandra Alter explores how Truman Capote and Harper Lee’s childhood friendship influenced their work, and wonders if the famous duo’s careers would have developed differently if their relationship wasn’t “strained by bitterness and rivalry.”
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Go Refund a Watchman
After all of the hype and controversy surrounding Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, some readers found themselves a little bit disappointed when they read the actual book. One book store in Michigan has started offering refunds for regretful readers.…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) It’s dubious whether these parents read either book. It’s not personal, it’s just privileged. Fact-checking the infamous nail salon story. Being bored in…
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The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Mohr and Janis Cooke Newman
Authors Joshua Mohr and Janis Cooke Newman talk with one another about their new novels, All This Life and A Master Plan for Rescue, respectively.
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Complements to the Canon
Vann R. Newkirk II (@fivefifths) writes for Seven Scribes on the experience of discovering novels by black writers to act as a necessary complement to reading Harper Lee’s reductive portrayals of race in Mockingbird and Watchman: These books, this canon, represented…
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The Editor Who Shaped Mockingbird
We’ll never know how Harper Lee’s editor, Therese von Hohoff Torrey, would have felt about the publication of Go Set A Watchman, because she died in 1974. But probably, she wouldn’t be excited about it: As Ms. Hohoff saw it, the…
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Lee’s “Parent Novel” Completes Manuscript Family
According to a recent account by Harper Lee’s lawyer, the famed author wrote a third manuscript that may be a “parent novel” that “bridges” To Kill A Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman together. The manuscript was discovered in Lee’s safe-deposit box, and is…
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To Talk To a Mockingbird
In 1978, while writing Gregory Peck’s biography, Michael Freedman had the privilege of talking on the phone with Harper Lee, resulting in possibly the only interview the author ever gave. Now, he writes about their conversation over at the Guardian: I…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) In the best news ever for someone yet to be determined, J.K. Rowling has announced an open casting call for her Harry Potter spin-off.…
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The Gods of Southern Gothic
At the Guardian, author M.O. Walsh tries to account for the global popularity of southern gothic literature. While he attributes much of southern gothic literature’s success to a tradition of oral storytelling, he also suggests that it is the southern novelist’s…
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Leave Harper Alone
The mysterious buzz surrounding the upcoming release of Harper Lee’s second novel, Go Set a Watchman, has had readers and journalists speculating about the elderly author’s mental capabilities in a manner often invasive and disrespectful. Lee answered a particularly nosy…
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Harper Lee Debate Rages On
Since the announcement of Harper Lee’s forthcoming novel Go Set a Watchman, residents of Lee’s hometown, Monroeville, Alabama, along with the general public, have questioned whether or not publishers are taking advantage of the eighty-eight year old author. Recently, however, Lee’s lawyer Tonja…