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"'A triumph on every level. One of the losses to literature is that Harper Lee never found a way to tell a gothic true-crime story she'd spent years researching. Casey Cep has excavated this mesmerizing story and tells it with grace and insight and a fierce fidelity to the truth.'--David Grann, best-selling author of Killers of the Flower Moon The stunning story of an Alabama serial killer and the true-crime book that Harper Lee worked on obsessively in the years after To Kill a Mockingbird. Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer was acquitted--thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend. Sitting in the audience during the vigilante's trial was Harper Lee, who had traveled from New York City to her native Alabama with the idea of writing her own In Cold Blood, the true-crime classic she had helped her friend Truman Capote research seventeen years earlier. Lee spent a year in town reporting, and many more working on her own version of the case. Now Casey Cep brings this nearly inconceivable story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South. At the same time, she offers a deeply moving portrait of one of the country's most beloved writers and her struggle with fame, success, and the mystery of artistic creativity"--… (mer)
Casey Cep was able to piece together this true story about a serial killer and the story of Harper Lee who had sat through the trial collecting all the information with the idea of writing a book about this case. Harper Lee never completed a manuscript, but Casey Cep got access to her files and her communications. I was hesitant to read a story about a serial killer, but this isn’t a graphic tell all. The first part of the book takes place inside the court room, with background on the murders, the accused, the insurance fraud and the lawyer who represented him. The twist is in the description so it's not a spoiler: the lawyer also goes on to represent the man who assassinates the killer. Part two is about the lawyer and he is interesting too. My favorite was part three about the writer Harper Lee and her struggle to write another book after To Kill a Mockingbird and dealing with becoming famous. ( )
Liked the way this was constructed. You get the murderer’s story, then the lawyer’s, then Harper Lee’s. I think there just wasn’t enough story there for Harper Lee to turn it into a book, but her presence added the element that made it work for Cep. The section on Lee was very interesting and a bit heart breaking ( )
This just never came together for me - what was portrayed as a cohesive novel involving a major trial and Lee’s coverage of it is disparate and never quite reaches the sum of its parts status. While the individual stories are very intriguing: the Reverend and his insurance scams, his murder, the life of Harper Lee, her friendship with Truman Capote and ultimately her ‘coverage’ of the trial for the Reverend’s murder. But they never tied together coherently in my opinion. ( )
She explains as well as it is likely ever to be explained why Lee went silent after “To Kill a Mockingbird.” (The clue’s in Cep’s title.) And it’s here, in her descriptions of another writer’s failure to write, that her book makes a magical little leap, and it goes from being a superbly written true-crime story to the sort of story that even Lee would have been proud to write.
Lee spent many years working on the project, but it never saw the light of day. Instead, more than four decades later, we have Cep’s absorbing new volume, which succeeds in telling the story that Nelle Harper Lee could not and offers an affecting account of Lee’s attempt to give meaning to a startling series of events.
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
We are bound by a common anguish. - Harper Lee
Dedikation
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
For my father and my mother, who gave me a pocket watch, then taught me to tell time and everything else
Inledande ord
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
Nobody recognized her.
Citat
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
No longer legally able to subjugate other people, wealthy white southerners turned their attention to nature instead. The untamed world seemed to them at worst like a mortal danger, seething with disease and constantly threatening disaster, and at best like a terrible waste. The numberless trees could be timber, the forests could be farms, the malarial swamps could be drained and turned to solid ground, wolves and bears and other fearsome predators could be throw rugs, taxidermy, and dinner. And as for the rivers, why should they get to play while people had to work? In the words of the president of the Alabama Power Company, Thomas Martin, “Every loafing stream is loafing at the public expense.” (p.7)
The boll weevil came north from Mexico and destroyed the cotton crop; the Communist Party came south to organize sharecroppers, and horrific violence followed in its wake. The Great Depression came from Wall Street and stayed in Alabama for a long, long time, longer than the boys who traveled to the local C.C.C. camp for a spell before returning to New Jersey or New York. (p. 11)
Violence has a way of destroying everything but itself. A murdered person’s name always threatens to become synonymous with her murder; a murdered person’s death always threatens to eclipse her life. That was especially true of an economically marginal black woman in Alabama. (p. 25)
...southerners were steeped in a culture that gave them something to do when the world was alarming or incomprehensible. In that, of course, they were not alone; like banshees in Ireland or fairy glens in Scotland or the ghosts and goblins of the Tohoku region of Japan, the influence of voodoo culture in the South pervaded its landscapes and enchanted its people, regardless of race, from cradle to grave. (p. 45)
it was better to believe that, in the face of conjuring, there was nothing that law enforcement and the judicial system could do than to believe that, in the face of terrible crimes, they had not done enough. Supernatural explanations flourish where law and order fails, which is why, as time passed and more people died, the stories about the Reverend grew stronger, stranger, and, if possible, more sinister. (p. 46)
Tom Radney’s colleagues in the legislature had no choice but to let him in the chamber, but they had no intention of letting any of his bills out of it. One year into his term, Tom confessed to a church group in Auburn that he felt as if he “had to spend more time fighting bad legislation than passing good legislation.” That bad legislation included a serious, if inexplicable, effort to remove Alabama from the United Nations, which made it through the house but not the senate; a bill that would have allowed the legislature to approve or reject speakers at state schools, which Tom managed to quash, partly through a public debate at Auburn University, where he mounted a passionate defense of academic freedom; and a Wallace-backed effort to defund the Tuskegee Institute, a recipient of state funding since 1881, which Tom derailed by threatening a one-man filibuster. The good legislation, proposed by Radney and resoundingly voted down, or denied a vote, included lowering the voting age in Alabama to eighteen (on the grounds that anyone old enough to die for their country in Vietnam was old enough to vote for its leadership), revising election laws around absentee voting, and removing a line item in the University of Alabama budget for the purchase of Confederate flags. (p. 88)
The under-told and stunning story of voter registration in the South is this: in 1965, 79 percent of eligible whites were registered to vote; five years later, that figure had risen to 97 percent. In the end, there simply weren’t enough votes to carry a progressive candidate like Tom into the runoff. (p. 99)
The summer of the book’s release, she wrote to a friend that she had been “in New York, where I became Famous; in Connecticut, where the Famous go to get used to it; in East Hampton, where the Famous go after they’ve gotten used to it.” But Lee never got used to it. (p. 194)
The Esquire editor seemed to her to regard that premise as “an axiomatic impossibility,” a concern that Lee, in turn, regarded as ridiculous: “According to those lights, nine-tenths of the South is an axiomatic impossibility.” She was right, and not just about the South. The kinds of people she described in her story weren’t only possible; they were prevalent. (p. 200)
Lee’s views fell somewhere between civil libertarian and uncivil curmudgeon. (p. 222)
Nothing writes itself. Left to its own devices, the world will never transform into words, and no matter how many pages of notes and interviews and documents a reporting trip generates, the one that matters most always starts out blank. (p. 238)
Lee, a fan of small-stakes gambling, was a withering casino critic (“the worst punishment God can devise for this sinner is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City,” she wrote to one friend in 1990). (p. 257)
As Kierkegaard observed, we live forward but comprehend backward; in all likelihood, not even Harper Lee knew the specific moment at which she abandoned any of her books. (p. 260)
But unfinishedness, like love and loss, comes in degrees. Something can be more unfinished or less: it can be a third of the way done or halfway done, but also halfway done for two years or halfway done for twenty. In a strange inversion, the closer to done a book is, the more unfinished, in this sense, it feels. (p. 261)
Somewhere along the line, she stopped doing two things destructive to her own well-being. One was drinking; the other was writing. (p.263)
Avslutande ord
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
The entirety of her literary assets, including whatever else exists of "The Reverend," remains unpublished and unknown.
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"'A triumph on every level. One of the losses to literature is that Harper Lee never found a way to tell a gothic true-crime story she'd spent years researching. Casey Cep has excavated this mesmerizing story and tells it with grace and insight and a fierce fidelity to the truth.'--David Grann, best-selling author of Killers of the Flower Moon The stunning story of an Alabama serial killer and the true-crime book that Harper Lee worked on obsessively in the years after To Kill a Mockingbird. Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer was acquitted--thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend. Sitting in the audience during the vigilante's trial was Harper Lee, who had traveled from New York City to her native Alabama with the idea of writing her own In Cold Blood, the true-crime classic she had helped her friend Truman Capote research seventeen years earlier. Lee spent a year in town reporting, and many more working on her own version of the case. Now Casey Cep brings this nearly inconceivable story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South. At the same time, she offers a deeply moving portrait of one of the country's most beloved writers and her struggle with fame, success, and the mystery of artistic creativity"--
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