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

by Casey Cep

“Books succeed, / And lives fail,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, and indeed throughout Lee’s life To Kill a Mockingbird succeeded. In 1993, she told her agent Julie Fallowfield that she wasn’t interested in writing an introduction for an anniversary edition of her novel. “Please spare Mockingbird an Introduction,” she wrote. “Although Mockingbird will be 33 this year, it has never been out of print and I am still alive, although very quiet. Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity. The only good thing about Introductions is that in some cases they delay the dose to come. Mockingbird still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive the years without preamble.”