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- [00:00]
Sponsor Voice
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- [00:38]
Charlie Gibson
Good morning Bookcase listeners. That's the way I used to start the program that I did for years and years and years, four times an hour saying Good Morning America. It is so nice now to be able to say Good morning bookcase listeners.
- [00:51]
Kate
If you are listening in the morning, but you can also listen in the evening or in the afternoon, you can basically good anything Readers, how are you? I am the Kate, part of the.
- [01:00]
Charlie Gibson
Hosting team of Kate and Charlie Gibson. Yes, before Christmas last year we were sort of stuck for a book that we wanted to talk about. So we thought it would be fun to go back and do a classic. And it being Christmas time, we talked to two Dickensian scholars about the Carol, as they called it, the Christmas Carol. And then a few months ago we talked about the Great Gatsby, the hundredth anniversary of the Great Gatsby and F. Scott Fitzgerald scholars. And we got very good response from you listeners. We thank you for that in talking about a classic. And so today we thought it would be fun to talk about To Kill a Mockingbird. That is a book that I think every single person, every single teenager, every single person's pet has probably read.
- [01:44]
Kate
Yeah, I think I read it first when I was a little older than Scout, the narrator's age. And now that I'm older, I'm probably more Atticus's age. It is a beloved book. PBS voted it the greatest American novel in their Great American Read a few years ago, although I think their comparison is problematic. But that being said, it is a beloved novel and I feel like all of us have read it and going back and rereading it, I remember it. You know what stuck with me when I read it the first time was the racial injustice from the trial, from the terrible trial of Tom Robinson, who is so obviously not guilty and of course is found guilty by the jury. And now that I'm older, I see it as, yes, it definitely has a powerful racial layer to it, but I also see it more as a coming of age novel. I forgot, for instance, that the Trial isn't even mentioned until a third of the way in the book. And up until then, it sort of scout Dill and Jem and their views on the world, their figuring the world out and how they want to be young men or women and if they want to be young men or women.
- [02:54]
Charlie Gibson
Harper Lee was a very enigmatic figure. I guess she really never spoke much about the book, never talked much about Mockingbird. It came out in 1960 and it was a sensation. But scholars haven't really approached it until recently, as you'll hear in a few moments. Really never got to it until the 1990s or even into the early 2000s. And I think most of us come away remembering Gregory Peck's voice and the movie. And when you go back and read it, it's a more nuanced novel, I think, than the movie is. Also, as you'll hear, it's interesting to look at it through the prism of Go Set a Watchman, which Harper Lee wrote before she wrote Mockingbird. It is a different characterization of Atticus Finch in that, a harsher depiction of Atticus Finch and how she changed it, why she changed it into Kill a Mockingbird. His character is really interesting. And Harper Lee only really did one interview. It was in 1964, I think, with a public radio station. And she didn't talk about it as a racial novel. She talked about it as coming of age and she talked about it as a Southern novel.
- [04:15]
Sponsor Voice
I would like to be the chronicler.
- [04:18]
Jonathan Cullick
Of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly, and that.
- [04:23]
Sponsor Voice
Is small town, middle class, Southern life. In other words, all I want to.
- [04:29]
Kate
Be is a Jane Austen of South Alabama. You know, it's interesting because Go Set a Watchman, as I was doing research for this show, was the most preordered book in history. That means it beat the last Harry Potter, which, if you remember, was about, you know, there were lines around the block and bookstores stayed open overnight and what have you. Go Set a Watchman set those same records. And yet it got very mixed reviews. And I think, and we ask our scholars about this, I think it is because Atticus is such a beloved character, he has such a huge moral compass in To Kill a Mockingbird. And I think the fact that that was nuanced and maybe he wasn't as blind to skin color as was implied in To Kill a Mockingbird really dethroned him for a lot of readers. And so it received a pretty tough Response, despite selling like hotcakes, to use the Southern metaphor. And so we talked about that as well.
- [05:29]
Charlie Gibson
So our two Harper Elise scholars are Shelley Reuter, who is a professor of American literature at the University of Cincinnati, and Jonathan Cullick, who was a professor of English at Northern Kentucky University. And they have written a book called Mockingbird Grows Up. Mockingbird Grows up makes the argument that you really need to look at To Kill a Mockingbird through the prism of Go Set a Watchman, the book that she wrote before she wrote Mockingbird. So here's our conversation with Shelley Reuter and Jonathan Cullick about To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. Shelley, let me start with you. The novel came out in 1960. What was the contemporaneous response to the novel?
- [06:18]
Jonathan Cullick
Not very good in the sense that it received book bands in various places, and I should say it was a popular book among its receiving audience.
- [06:29]
Sponsor Voice
And it should be noted that it received a Pulitzer Prize and, and then of course, optioned for a movie. And the movie itself was highly popular, Academy Award winner. And it's, it's become a classic.
- [06:41]
Charlie Gibson
But that was immediate, that it began to sell, Jonathan, and that the movie contract came pretty quickly.
- [06:47]
Sponsor Voice
Yeah, sales were strong, even though critical response, as Shelley noted, was initially mixed. But it was a popular book from from the outset.
- [06:56]
Jonathan Cullick
The one thing that's so beautiful about this book is it's multi layered in terms of a public conversation and a scholarly conversation and a sort of cultural conversation and all of these things existing at once. Really. The scholarly conversation didn't start until really around 2007 with Alice Petrie's book. That's the first time scholars took it seriously. But, you know, high school teachers who initially shied away from it started teaching it pretty robustly already in the 70s.
- [07:27]
Sponsor Voice
And I should mention that among scholars, the initial scholars to be attracted to this book were actually not literary scholars, they were legal scholars. So some of the earliest articles in law journals started to appear, what, in the early 1990s. And actually some of these early legal scholars were critics criticizing. Actually they were critical of Atticus Finch's methods in the courtroom and his whole approach to the trial. So that's pretty interesting initial critical response.
- [07:57]
Jonathan Cullick
Although once again, it was the same sort of thing in the legal world because Atticus Finch had already been named Attorney of the Year by the American Bar Association.
- [08:05]
Sponsor Voice
True.
- [08:05]
Jonathan Cullick
Yeah. This fictional character.
- [08:07]
Sponsor Voice
So mixed response.
- [08:08]
Charlie Gibson
Yes, it's interesting that those responses came so long after publication. The lawyers aren't writing about it until 30 years after publication. The scholars aren't getting to it until many, many years after publication. And yet the public response was very positive and that the book was selling, if you'll pardon the cliche, like hotcakes.
- [08:31]
Jonathan Cullick
Yes.
- [08:32]
Sponsor Voice
Yeah. I think it's still the case now that the public and critics have somewhat different responses, or maybe not just somewhat, but really pretty different responses to the book. You know, this novel was recently named, just in the past few years, America's most beloved novel. PBS did a series where people around the country could vote on their top 100 favorite novels, and number one at the top of the list was To Kill a Mockingbird. And I think, you know, Oprah Winfrey a number of years ago called it America's novel. Right. So Atticus Finch has been kind of looked up to as a kind of an icon, an icon as a father, an icon, as. As an attorney, an advocate in the courtroom. But among literary critics, and I think also among legal, there has been a more critical approach to the social and cultural messages of the book.
- [09:24]
Jonathan Cullick
I do want to sort of reference it as the sort of the novel of the 20th century that a lot of people don't read accurately. And by that I mean that there's a life of its own. The only phenomenon, the only other book that I can think of that has this level of engagement with the public, in the public imagination, is Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin in the 19th century, where a lot of people hadn't read it, but everybody thought they knew it.
- [09:51]
Sponsor Voice
I'll also just add here, I think that Gregory Peck had a lot to do with that, too. Gregory Peck in the film created this indelible image of Atticus that I think very much stays in people's minds to the extent that, like now, even when I'm reading the novel, I'm still in my mind picturing Gregory Peck saying these words out of the book.
- [10:10]
Kate
So many people think of this book as about racial justice or racial injustice, and yet I get the sense when I go back and I read about Harper Lee, that she was reluctant to talk about the book that way. Why?
- [10:22]
Jonathan Cullick
Oh, that's a very good question. And when she talks about the book, she talks about as is sort of the true Southern novel. And she says, who are Southerners? And she says, you know, we're Scottish, we're Anglo. She never says, we're African American. So, I mean, I think this is really important to note that she. She is wanting to write the novel of the south, which included an attorney who defends A black man in court, that becomes the racial novel. And it's, at the time, I think it's sort of a lazy person's response. It's like, okay, we've done everything we need to do about rape. We're done. And we don't have to look into the nuances. There's still a certain level of race, a different level of racism that occupies the book even, and it even doesn't even get touched.
- [11:09]
Kate
But I've also heard criticisms that, yes, that is, in a sense, and again, this is a categorization that it is a quote unquote, white savior novel. And that in some ways it makes us comfortable with racism because the accusers in the novel are very lower class members of the town that she, in a sense, otherizes the accusers. How do you answer criticisms like that?
- [11:35]
Sponsor Voice
Well, I was gonna say that this is where it's helpful to read Go Set a Watchman. The. You could say the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, which Harperly wrote first and then later turned into Mockingbird with the. With the assistance of her editor at Lippincott and Gosetta, Watchmen, these issues of race are dealt with much more head on, much more directly. What we say in our book is that while To Kill a Mockingbird comes across as a timeless novel, Go Set a Watchman is more of a timely novel, very much in its time period, responding to the Brown versus Board of Education decision and dealing more head on with issues of state rights and the role of the federal government. So we know from, from Go Set a Watchman what was in Harper Lee's mind as she was then writing To Kill a Mockingbird. But what happens with Go Set A Watchman? Is she. She is. She's Jane Louise at the age of 26, visiting home from New York where, where she lives. And she's discovering, to her shock and probably to a lot of readers, that her father, Atticus, is a member of a White Citizens Council. Yeah. Which. Which is basically a racist council. And she finds in the home these pamphlets that he's been reading which are just, you know, blatantly, blatantly racist. And so. And Go Set a Watchman, she follows him and she goes up into the balcony of the courthouse where this White Citizens Council's meeting. And just as she did when she was a child, sort of watching her father defend this black man, now she's. She's watching her father, you know, participate in this meeting. So Harper Lee sets that book aside and that book is much more hard hitting and probably would have been, would you agree, more difficult to publish at that time period.
- [13:34]
Jonathan Cullick
It was so difficult to publish that the publishers rejected it. And it was. And you know, so she presumably in shame, stuck it in a safe for 50 years, but she was. And Tay Ho Hop actually suggested that she write this novel about childhood. So, Kate, I wasn't really dodging your question. I'm ultimately coming back to it, what it really is about. So this other novel, you could either call the, the, the sequel, or you could call it the novel's first draft, or you could call it the prequel of whatever you want to call it. Somehow this other novel, Ghost at a Watchmen, that did take on directly the race issue. And, you know, it's really polemical, not very well crafted yet. It was a first draft. It wasn't. But she's arguing with her father a lot in this 26 year old Jean Louise just coming back from New York and who thinks that she might be, you know, she might have some knowledge that her father doesn't. She's dismayed. She has never encountered this concept that we now call being a, you know, a good white liberal racist. Really. That's what I would argue. To get back to your initial question, Kate, that is actually what I would argue that To Kill a Mockingbird really is about. It's about, it's, it's, it's, it's a coming of age novel.
- [14:54]
Kate
But I got the sense that the public response to Go Set a Watchman was in some ways an upset that Harper Lee had, in a sense, dethroned Atticus as the hero, as the moral compass of To Kill a Mockingbird.
- [15:09]
Sponsor Voice
Yes, a lot of people were upset that this hero had been kind of knocked off the pedestal. I think that the important thing for us as readers to keep in mind is that if Atticus is being knocked off a pedestal, first it's being done by his own creator. I mean, it's being done by Harper Lee that this was her original conception of Atticus. But I would also push back and say, I don't know that. And maybe Shelley will have something to say about this. I don't know that Harper Lee herself wanted him on the pedestal in the first place. Because what happens, it goes set a Watchman as she's confronting, you know, her, her father. But in To Kill a Mockingbird, she's presenting an image of her father as a more moderate southerner. But there's a writer, Joseph Crispino, who wrote a book, Atticus the Biography, which is essentially a biography of Harper Lee's father. And it makes a lot of parallels between To Kill a Mockingbird and Harper Lee's relationship with her own father. It's really fascinating book. And in the book he, he makes a point. He uses Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, a passage where King is critical of moderate white Southerners because he says that they're gradualist in their approach. They keep telling him, look, slow down, asking for social justice and equal rights. You're moving too fast. And they're too willing to accept the status quo or reluctant to, to, to let it go all, all at once. And Crispino makes this argument that it's, it's like Martin Luther King was criticizing Southerners like Atticus Finch. And we see that happening, I think with Harper Lee's relationship with her own father.
- [17:04]
Jonathan Cullick
She wants people to love him. Say, you know, okay, maybe she wants people. And by people, I mean white people in the town and in the country. She wants people to see him sympathetically. And the funny thing is that that lens, even as Atticus becomes sort of a father figure and a sort of a paternal and lovable and sympathetic from both sides of the extreme overt racists and the people who are trying to push against it, he becomes this sort of personal figure. So I mean, I really don't think he. I do think that in the film, he's perfect. In To Kill a Mockingbird, he's not so chalet.
- [17:45]
Charlie Gibson
Jonathan, let us interrupt you for a moment. We'll take a break for a few messages and come back and talk some more.
- [17:57]
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- [17:59]
Jonathan Cullick
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- [18:37]
Sponsor Voice
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- [18:39]
Jonathan Cullick
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- [18:42]
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- [19:10]
Charlie Gibson
I hear both of you saying that Go Set A Watchman is much more autobiographical and a story of her father and To Kill a Mockingbird is much more fictionalized.
- [19:25]
Sponsor Voice
Well, when you, when you read Ghostetta Watchmen, you're, we're reading these dialogues that Jean Louise is having with her, with her father, as Shelley noted. And a lot of these conversations kind of turn into speeches. It's almost like Harper Lee was writing these essays to try to work out her own relationship with her father as, as well as her relationship with the South. And that's why, you know, Shelley noted that it's not quite a finished novel because you don't really capture readers attention with these kind of long, these long speeches.
- [19:59]
Jonathan Cullick
One of the things that I do want to say, and this is funny, you know, shocker. Jonathan and I don't always agree. We've had this about, about things, we've had this wonderful collaboration over, over many years. But I think there's a slight difference between us about whether we think Ghost Setter Watchmen is a good novel or not, which I do.
- [20:19]
Sponsor Voice
The main disagreement, you know, that I have just about the quality of the novel is just as, as one book reviewer said, it's, it's a manuscript in search of an editor. I do think that Jean Louise is an interesting character and I think the tension between her and her father is pretty interesting. And in Go Set a Watchman, it's just that there's the speechifying, some plot points that don't go anywhere. Sentences that just need some clarity, that kind of thing. That would just be my main.
- [20:46]
Charlie Gibson
Now it's Sherry who's taking her head. No, emphatically. Let me come back, let me come back to Mockingbird. She grew up living next to Truman Capote. Do we know she wrote it?
- [20:58]
Sponsor Voice
Yes, absolutely. Yes. Yeah, yeah, we, we know, we know she wrote this. And I, you know, I think we need to be sensitive, you know, toward any, any kind of insinuation, you know, that, that, well, maybe she didn't write the novel because, you know, she was like, you know, she's a one hit wonder or she, she didn't give interviews much and didn't say much about it, that, that sort of thing. And you know, we, we do know that Harper Lee and Truman Capote did collaborate later after Mockingbird as he was writing In Cold Blood and she went to Can, Kansas with him and assisted him in doing a lot of the research, and she also assisted in doing a lot of the interviews. So actually, the assistance or the collaboration between them really went more in that direction of her assisting Capote in the other direction.
- [21:49]
Jonathan Cullick
Yes.
- [21:49]
Sponsor Voice
Truman Capote's papers have no indication at all that he was in any way responsible for authoring any part of. Of Mockingbird. Truman Capote was a very charismatic sort of figure. He liked media attention and kind of hobnobbing with celebrities and being on television. And it's just, it's very hard to believe that if he had written Part of Mockingbird that he would not have said something to kind of, you know, take some credit for that.
- [22:23]
Charlie Gibson
Let me pick up on that. Was that editor that you talk about basically responsible for Harper Lee changing Atticus from Ghost at a Watchman, where he does have very racist views, to the more compassionate Atticus Finch in Macha?
- [22:41]
Jonathan Cullick
I don't.
- [22:42]
Sponsor Voice
I don't know that there's any indication of that. Now we, we. We must admit that little is known about the entire creative process because, you know, Harper Lee's papers are currently archived and they're not going to be released, you know, for. For decades. But we know that Hohoff was responsible for guiding Harper Lee in the direction that. That To Kill a Mockingbird took, like, from the perspective of Scout as a child. And Harper Lee herself even joked that, you know, she was a new writer and she said something to the effect of, I did. Did as I was told. You know, she was following her. Her editor's directions. So we do know that the, the, like, the structure of to. To Kill a Mockingbird, the germ of that idea came from the editor.
- [23:26]
Jonathan Cullick
That's right. And I, I really do think it had more to do with the. What was happening to her father at the time, that she wanted to sort of protect him ultimately from the judgment of the overtly racist people who thought he was too extreme by even defending a black man. After all, that was why the. So many people initially, so many teachers and so forth, refused to teach the book. Initially they thought it was a pinko commie book. You know, how dare somebody even go this far as to defend a white man defending a black man in court and trying to celebrate it. So I really think it really was more about her desire. But what she. If you read the end of Ghost at a Watchmen, you might see she's decided to come home.
- [24:12]
Kate
I'm going to do something unfair, which is ask sort of a philosophical question. We were reading back and forth research about Harper Lee talking about Mockingbird grows up your book.
- [24:22]
Sponsor Voice
And.
- [24:22]
Kate
And we found. My dad was reading me Harper Lee's words this morning, and she says that few of us achieve compassion. And so I wanted to ask, do you think compassion is easier when you're a child? And that's why it was important to have to kill a mockingbird come from a child's perspective.
- [24:40]
Sponsor Voice
I. I don't know that Mockingbird reaches a definitive answer on that point. I don't think it does. But I do think that Harper Lee shows two different views of compassion or empathy in childhood. It appears later in the novel, and it's this polarity between Scout and her older brother Jem. So after the trial, they're talking about all that's happened in their town. And their father, earlier in the. In the novel, Atticus has said to his brother, their uncle, that, you know, I hope that we can get through this trial without Jam and Scout picking up the. What does he call it?
- [25:29]
Charlie Gibson
The.
- [25:29]
Sponsor Voice
The disease of. Of Maycomb. This. This. The racism in. In the town. I hope we can get through it. So. So after the trial, they're talking, the kids are talking, and they're talking about the word folks. What are folks in town? And Scout says, you know, I think we're all alike. I think folks are just folks. And then Jim, the older brother, who in the novel is always a little more reflective and philosophical, says, no, no, there. There are different kinds of folks in town. And so at the top of this hierarchy, he says, there are the regular folks. You know, us, We. We can read and write.
- [26:06]
Jonathan Cullick
Southern aristocracy.
- [26:08]
Sponsor Voice
Exactly.
- [26:08]
Jonathan Cullick
Yeah.
- [26:09]
Sponsor Voice
And then. And then there are the other folks, you know, the. The. The Cunninghams. The. The. The. The white folks. Laborers and. And. And farmers and such. You know, and then there are the. The Yules, right? So. So these are the. The poor white folks, right? The. The. The Yule family, Mayela Yule, the one being the accuser of Tom Robinson. And then. And then they're the black folks. And Jim is just kind of looking at how we all live in these different places and we all have these different communities. And then the conversation concludes with Scout saying, you know, and I'm paraphrasing, but I don't know. I think folks are just folks.
- [26:49]
Jonathan Cullick
She literally says folks are just folks.
- [26:51]
Sponsor Voice
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So. So what you have then are two different views of children looking at their. At the social structure and trying to make sense of it. So I don't think even Harper Lee is arriving at a simple solution. But I will say at the end of the novel, when Scout is walking Boo Radley, that is to say, Mr. Arthur Radley, home, she walks him home and he goes inside, never to be heard from again. As, as the narrator Jean Louise says, and, and, and Scout turns around and she's what, about 8 years old at this point? And she says, you know, the whole neighborhood looks so different. And she says, yeah, I felt old. Which is a very, very unusual thing to, you know, imagine a child feeling. So clearly something has changed within her. And if we want to call it compassion or empathy, I think that's be a good start.
- [27:54]
Jonathan Cullick
One of the things is, though, the reason, Kate, that I would say that ultimately this is more almost the novel about the failure of empathy than about empathy is because what the book does teach us is who to have empathy for and who not to worry about. And I mean, I think that it is striking that we do learn through the scenes such as what Jonathan described. We do end up having a great deal of empathy for Boo who's, you know, there's so much, much going on. We learn not to. We learn to forget about Tom Robinson who has. And Tom Robinson's family. We, we don't, you know, so at the very end, in this beautiful, compassionate scene of, of her with Atticus in the room and all will be well, and he would be there in the morning. Tom Robinson has died. His little kids who are about the same age as Jem and Scout, we. We don't think about them anymore. We don't even know we think about Helen Robinson because after all, Link Diaz has stepped out. He's going to go ahead and walk her to work every day. So as far as we're concerned, all is right with the world. You know, that's all the black family needs to worry about, is that the mama can get to her job as a domestic servant. So, I mean, it's really, in some ways, it's very empathetic. At the same time, it's very. It's almost concerningly there. There are, There are critics who have said that it's concerningly racist in a certain way.
- [29:20]
Sponsor Voice
I'll pick up on, on. On that. One point of, of criticism that some have observed with Atticus is that, you know, he's always telling his children. These are some famous lines out of the novel, always telling his children, well, you know, you. You need to kind of step into other people's skin. You need to see other people's point of view, but that the people whose point of view he's always asking his children to See through are these racist and potentially violent racists. In fact, there was one legal scholar, I think it was Monroe Friedman, who made this point that, you know, Atticus is saying about Walter Cunningham. Walter Cunningham was kind of the leader of this would be lynch mob. And there's this face off in the novel at the jail. You know, it's Atticus versus, versus the, the lynch mob and Atticus and Scout actually, and Jem versus the lynch mob, and Walter Cunningham's at the head of that. And so Friedman makes this, this point that, you know, Atticus is saying, well, you know, Walter Cunningham, you know, you know, he's a member of our community. You know, he's. He, he's our friend. You know, sure, he has his flaws. And Friedman says, you know, the man who Atticus says has flaws, it just turns out his greatest flaw is a homicidal hatred of black people. And so that's, that's where this, that's where this criticism of, of Atticus comes from.
- [30:42]
Kate
Yeah, it puts a different spin on the speech that Atticus gives to Jem and, and Scout where he says, these people were our friends before this and they'll be our friends after.
- [30:51]
Charlie Gibson
In the pantheon. Everybody talks about the great American novel in the pantheon of American novels does this, as far as you're concerned, the two of you. Mockingbird right at the top.
- [31:03]
Jonathan Cullick
I'm going to switch the question around and say the question is going to be, should we still be reading To Kill a Mockingbird? And I. And weirdly enough, despite Ako Ajay who says, absolutely we shouldn't because of how the embarrassment it causes and pain it can cause for African American young people, I'm going to take the high ground with Toni Morrison and say, actually it's Toni Morrison said we need to know the canon. We need to know what has been taught historically because of that cultural conversation. Regardless of whether we stop teaching it, it's still the sort of mythos around. To Kill a Mockingbird is still going to exist. I mean, Barack Obama quotes Mockingbird. Everybody has something to say about To Kill a Mockingbird and they think they know. So I think we need to teach it.
- [31:57]
Sponsor Voice
It should be read, it should be reread, revisited, rethought about, and we should keep having dialogue about it.
- [32:05]
Charlie Gibson
Thank you both. This has been really interesting, fascinating. I really enjoyed it. Thank you ever so much.
- [32:10]
Sponsor Voice
Absolutely. Us too. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
- [32:13]
Charlie Gibson
Thank you.
- [32:14]
Jonathan Cullick
Appreciate it.
- [32:20]
Charlie Gibson
One of the things we didn't include when we edited down our discussion with Shelley Reuter and Jonathan Cullick, was the issue of why she never published again. And there really isn't a good answer. I mean, they were. They were sort of stumped. They looked at each other when they. When we asked the question. It's sort of inexplicable. She had this incredible success. I read somewhere that she was receiving $3 million a year in royalties from the book even many years after its publication. So she was well off. She didn't need to publish again. But she didn't. Now, why? I don't know.
- [32:57]
Kate
I don't know either. I get the sense that she. Even when you listen to the sound bite that we used before we started our interview, you get the sense that she picked her words very carefully. It may have been that she was just too slow a writer and too slow an editor. We know, as we talked about in the interview, that she did take some time to go with Truman Capote to research and report for In Cold Blood, which, by the way, if you haven't read it, is an incredible book. And so we know that she's still. And she even talks in the interview that we use the bite from about how much she actually loves the act of writing. So I don't know why she doesn't. I wish she had, because To Kill a Mockingbird holds such a big place in my heart. And I dearly wish she had written some more.
- [33:41]
Charlie Gibson
Maybe she knew you just can't top yourself.
- [33:43]
Sponsor Voice
Maybe.
- [33:43]
Charlie Gibson
I mean, when you've done the sort of. When you get that kind of response, when you have written such a terrific book, then maybe you're scared to try to top yourself. I don't know.
- [33:54]
Kate
I think of that as sort of the Seinfeld neuroses. So she got herself some Seinfeld neuroses. She wanted to go. She wanted to go out at the top of her game. And man, did she. Which is why Go Set A Watchman, I think, was controversial because people never really got a sense of whether or not publishing that book had her complete blessing. Was it edited the same way? Did she think it through the same way?
- [34:18]
Charlie Gibson
You mentioned, as did Shelley and Jonathan. The fact that she helped Truman Capote on In Cold Blood, one of the incredible coincidences, to me, maybe it's not a coincidence, but it's one of the most impossible to really comprehend. The idea that in the tiny town, tiny, tiny, tiny town of Monroeville, Alabama, Harper Lee and Truman Capote lived next door to one another and grew up together. That's really hard to believe. And as Shelley and Jonathan said, it's been put to rest the thought that maybe Truman Capote attributed to Mockingbird she wrote it herself.
- [34:55]
Kate
But what an odd friendship. I mean, he was so flashy and he was such a publicity hound, and he loved to go to parties and he loved to talk about himself. And then you have Lee, who was. I wouldn't say. I mean, they say themselves she wasn't a recluse, but she definitely. She wasn't. She didn't like to toot her own horn very much, and yet she was friends with maybe the biggest horn tutor of literature.
- [35:22]
Charlie Gibson
A horn tutor?
- [35:23]
Kate
A horn tutor. That's what I'm calling him. And I'm sticking to it.
- [35:25]
Charlie Gibson
There's a new characterization.
- [35:27]
Kate
Yeah, exactly.
- [35:28]
Charlie Gibson
But she went to New York to find out if she could write and then eventually came back to Monroeville and settled there and lived a very, very quiet life and did very few interviews. Anyway, we thank Shelley and we thank Jonathan. It's a really interesting discussion and it is a great, great book. Whether it's the great American novel or just one of the great American novels, who knows?
- [35:51]
Kate
We hope you'll continue listening to us despite the fact that we don't again have a coda this week. We know that the coda is the reason so many of you tune in, but we do hope that you'll stay while we remind you about the great folks who make this podcast possible and that you'll join us again next week for another edition of the beloved Bookcase.
- [36:10]
Charlie Gibson
The Bookcase with Kate and Charlie is a joint production of Good Morning America and ABC Audio. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions, and our executive producer is Simone Swink. We want to make special mention of Amanda McMaster, Sabrina Kohlberg and Ariel Chester of ABC Good Morning America and Josh Cohan of ABC Audio. You can follow us and rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like to find any of the books mentioned on this podcast, you can find them listed in the episode description.
- [36:46]
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Kate
I'm good.
- [37:13]
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Charlie Gibson
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