Note sull'episodio
On a freezing New York night in the late 1950s, a frustrated young writer hurled her manuscript out an apartment window into the snow, and her editor ordered her to go dig every page back out. This episode traces the life of Nell Harper Lee, from her father Amasa Coleman Lee's doomed defense of a Black father and son who were hanged, through her decision to drop out of law school one semester before graduating, to the 1956 Christmas gift from friends that funded a full year of writing.
We cover how editor Tay Hohoff spent more than two years pushing Lee to rebuild an episodic manuscript titled Go Set a Watchman through a child's eyes, the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, her research trips to Kansas with Truman Capote for In Cold Blood, and the collapse of that friendship. The episode then follows her half-century retreat from public life, the abandoned projects The Long Goodbye and The Reverend, and the ethically fraught 2015 publication of that original draft after the death of her sister and protector, Alice.
- Why she needed the distance of New York City to write clearly about the Deep South
- How shifting the narrator from a cynical adult to a child exposed the town's prejudice as absurd
- Her scathing 1966 letter to a Virginia school board that tried to ban her novel as immoral
- The lawsuits, stroke, and sensory decline that preceded the announcement of a so-called sequel
- The Alabama elder abuse investigation and the debate over who an artist's discarded drafts belong to