To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird
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Harper Lee on To Kill a Mockingbird
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A world going down the drainLee described the novel’s beginning as something that resisted a clean origin story even as she looked back on it years later. The book did not start from a single idea she could name; it accumulated, and her role was less to generate it than to stay with it once it had begun moving.
In one sense, I think that Mockingbird was a natural for me, at any rate, for my first effort. In its inception it was sort of like Topsy — it just grew, but the actual mechanics of the work itself were quite different. Naturally, you don’t sit down in ‘white hot inspiration’ and write with a burning flame in front of you. But since I knew I could never be happy being anything but a writer, and Mockingbird put itself together for me so accommodatingly, I kept at it because I knew it had to be my first novel, for better or for worse.
Behind the personal compulsion was a specific cultural fear. Lee had grown up in Monroeville, Alabama, a small-town world she watched being overtaken by the Gothic grotesque and the plantation myth that dominated Southern literary identity. She wanted to put a different South on record before it vanished entirely, and she reached for a literary comparison that was deliberate: Jane Austen, not Faulkner.
I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly, and that is small-town, middle-class Southern life, as opposed to the Gothic, as opposed to Tobacco Road, as opposed to plantation life, that kind of thing. There is something universal in it. There’s something decent to be said for it and there’s something to lament when it goes and it’s going, it’s passing. In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of South Alabama. [paraphrased from audio]
Even as the book was being celebrated for its treatment of race, Lee pushed back against the category. Speaking to the Birmingham Post-Herald in 1962, two years after publication and in the middle of the American civil rights movement, she insisted the novel was aiming at something wider than the moment its readers were reading it through.
My book had a universal theme. It’s not a ‘racial’ novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.
How she wrote it
Rewriting until two in the morningA 1950 letter Lee wrote to one of her sisters, published decades later in the posthumous collection ‘The Land of Sweet Forever,’ describes the daily rhythm she had already settled into on shorter work before the novel existed. The novel would take roughly two years of writing spread across three because family problems forced repeated pauses, but the underlying method was the same: draft, break, tear apart, rebuild, retype.
From around noon, work on the first draft. By dinnertime, I’ve usually put my idea down. I then stop for a sandwich or a full meal, depending on whether I’ve got to think more about the story or just finish it. After dinner, I work on a second draft, which involves sometimes tearing the story up and putting it together again in an entirely different way, or just keeping at it until everything is like I want it. Then I retype it on white paper, conforming to rules of manuscript preparation, and run out & mail it. That sounds simple, but sometimes I have worked through the night on one; usually I end up around two or three in the morning.
The absorption that method required was not incidental to how she worked. It was the condition she sought. She told Roy Newquist in 1964 that the danger of writing, for her, was not that it was too hard but that it was too consuming to stop.
I like to write. Sometimes I’m afraid that I like it too much because when I get into work I don’t want to leave it. As a result I’ll go for days and days without leaving the house or wherever I happen to be.
Absorption alone was not the standard she held herself to. At the sentence level, she had a specific complaint about American writing, and she named the absence she kept trying to fill.
There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.
Lee also drew a line, hard and without apology, between two different kinds of people who sit down at a desk. The distinction mattered to her because it clarified what writing actually requires before it can become a craft.
Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they’re quite different from people who must write. People who write for reward by way of recognition or monetary gain don’t know what they’re doing. They’re in the category of those who write; they are not writers.
The personal thread
Her father’s pocket watchThe casting of Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation was not just a Hollywood decision Lee approved from a distance. She was on set, and the moment Peck stepped out of his dressing room she saw her own father standing in front of her. Her father Amasa Coleman Lee had practiced law in Monroeville, occasionally defended Black clients in court, and was the living model for Atticus. What she saw in Peck’s body was not performance; it was recognition.
My Daddy had a pocket watch that he wore at all times in court. I gave Greg the watch, and showed him how Daddy used to use it.
The watch was not a prop loan. It was her way of completing a transfer she had begun on the page. Once Peck had it, she considered the role settled permanently, and she enforced that judgment for the rest of her life by refusing every subsequent offer to remake the story in another medium.
In that film, the man and the part met. As far as I’m concerned, that part is Greg’s for life. I’ve had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I’ve always refused.
What she wants us to sit with
No preamble requiredWhen Lee was invited to write an introduction for the 1993 edition of the novel, more than thirty years after publication, she declined to offer one in any meaningful sense. The refusal was not modesty. She had a theory about what introductions do to the experience of reading, and she applied it to her own book without exception.
Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity.
In the same note for that edition, she made her one substantive claim about what the decades had shown her. She did not argue for the book’s importance or trace its influence. She offered a single sentence that trusted the reader to test it.
Mockingbird still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive the years without preamble.
That sentence is the closest Lee ever came to a thesis statement about her own work. She did not say what the book says. She said it still says it, and she left the rest to the reader sitting down with it now.