Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

by Casey Cep

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.

Mouths don’t empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and knowing.”

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,

“State’s rights and Southern way of life” was a barely coded appeal to white supremacy,

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, / And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law”),

“He writes not to communicate with other people,” Lee said of any writer worth his salt, “but to communicate more assuredly with himself.”

History isn’t what happened but what gets written down, and the various sources that make up the archival record generally overlooked the lives of poor black southerners.