*Winner of the 2007 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance for Best Nonfiction Book
*Quill Award Nominee for Biography *Junior Literary Guild selection
*2009 Best book for Young Adults—ALA
I am familiar with To Kill a Mockingbird. We read it in high school, and I loved the book then. I was not familiar at all with the world of Harper Lee, as she has been a notorious recluse for many years now. The little I knew about her is that she modeled her character, Atticus Finch, after her father.
The Biography was fascinating. I never knew that Truman Capote and Nelle (Harper) Lee were next door neighbors growing up. It does make you wonder what kind of influence the two had upon each other. I did find myself fascinated by Nelle Lee. She was a maverick in her own time. Unconcerned with what conventional wisdom said a woman should be and do, she made her own unconventional way through the world. She was a smart woman, unconcerned with make-up or fashion. She lasted for a year at her Huntingdon College, and then transferred to the University of Alabama. She wrote for both the Crimson White and the Rammer Jammer, the two newspaper publications published at Alabama. In her Junior year, she not only became the Editor in Chief of Rammer Jammer (the campus humor magazine), she began studying Law. Eventually, Nelle dropped out of school one semester before graduating to go to New York. The book then goes on to chronicle the work Nelle put into creating To Kill a Mockingbird, and the movie version of the book. Projects that Nelle has worked on since finishing Mockingbird are explored.
I think I was inspired the most by the story of Nelle’s sister, Alice. Alice was the first person in the family to go to college. She left college after a year, and came home to help her father run his various businesses and raise her younger brothers and sisters. After seven years raising her younger siblings, she went to work for the Social Security Administration, and began to rise in the ranks of that fledgling bureaucracy. Her father eventually convinced her to come back home and work in his law firm. She took graduate courses at night, became a lawyer, and began practicing law in her family business. Alice broke many of the barriers that women faced who wanted to pursue a career – a profession. Alice, who was significantly older than Nelle, became Nelle’s role model in life.
This would be an awesome book for teens because it does explore decisions that she made in her young adult years- where to go to college, studying law as a Junior in college, and leaving college early to go make her way in New York City – and how these decisions directly impacted her career, and her writing. It shows that it is okay to be different, and stand apart from the crowd. Both Nelle, and her sister, Alice were mavericks who went against the crowd. They experienced great success in their careers.
Would I have this title in my YA collection at my library? Yes. Harper Lee has written one of the most influential works of fiction of the latter half of the 20th century. Students are required to read To Kill A Mockingbird in school. Harper Lee has been a recluse for most of her adult life. To have any additional information at all about her life is a gem beyond measure.
Author Website:
http://www.charlesjshields.com/content/index.asp
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