I Am Scout by Charles J. Shields

Author:Charles J. Shields
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

Chapter 7

Mockingbird Takes Off

In Spring 1960, Nelle presented Truman with 150 pages of typed notes organized by topic, including the Landscape, the Crime, Other Members of the Clutter Family, and so on. Truman, feeling expansive as he rested in Spain after several months of working, was in the mood to make one of his gossipy pronouncements, for it was immensely satisfying to him that his student—which is how he regarded Nelle—had written a publishable novel in which he was an important character. He loved the idea. To his society friends, film producer David O. Selznick and his wife, Jennifer Jones, Truman wrote, “On July 11th [1960], Lippincott is publishing a delightful book: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee. Get it. It’s going to be a great success. In it, I am the character called ‘Dill’—the author being a childhood friend.”1

Truman, who liked to say he was “as big as a shotgun and just as noisy,” was eager to broadcast that he was a character in a new novel, but his prediction that To Kill a Mockingbird would be popular was hardly a guess. During March and April, well before the book reached bookstores, responses from early readers had outstripped all Nelle’s expectations. “I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little.”2 So far, early signs promised far more than that: the Literary Guild had chosen To Kill a Mockingbird as one of its selections, and Reader’s Digest for one of its Condensed Books.

In Monroeville, the news of a local girl making good led to an exuberant item in the Monroe Journal: “Everybody, but everybody, is looking forward to publication … of Nell [sic] Harper Lee’s book, To Kill a Mockingbird.… It’s wonderful. The characters are so well defined, it’s crammed and jammed with chuckles, and then there are some scenes that will really choke you up.”3 Ernestine’s Gift Shop, on the town square, scored a coup when the owner announced that Nelle would be holding a book-signing there just as soon as she was back in town.

Within a few weeks after the release of To Kill a Mockingbird, in July 1960, the novel hit both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune lists of top 10 bestsellers. Reviewers for major publications found themselves enchanted by it.

“[I]t is pleasing to recommend a book that shows what a novelist can do with familiar situations,” wrote Herbert Mitgang in the New York Times. “Here is a storyteller justifying the novel as a form that transcends time and place.” Frank Lyell, in another New York Times piece, breathed a sigh of relief that “Maycomb has its share of eccentrics and evil-doers, but Miss Lee has not tried to satisfy the current lust for morbid, grotesque tales of Southern depravity.” The New York World Telegram predicted “a bright future beckoning” the author, and the Tennessee Commercial Appeal announced the addition of “another new writer to the growing galaxy of Southern novelists.

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