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

by Casey Cep

“To gather the streams from waste and to draw from them energy, labor without brains, and so to save mankind from toil that it can be spared,” wrote the celebrated justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Court’s unanimous opinion, “is to supply what, next to intellect, is the very foundation of all our achievements and all our welfare.”

That summer, a reporter for the Associated Press broke the news that for the past forty years the federal government had knowingly deceived hundreds of impoverished black sharecroppers participating in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, taking notes and withholding treatment as many of them sickened and died. The

As a rule, most southern towns are allergic to authority and resent any federal presence that isn’t a post office.

Mostly, though, the things they did for fun they did for free. They turned cornfields into the battlefield of Gettysburg, and cattails into the jungles of West Africa. If they stared at the ground, they were leading brigades of ants over field and mountain; if they looked to the sky, they were flying like Amelia Earhart or Lucky Lindy across the Atlantic. When there were enough of them together, they played electricity, ostrich tag, looby loo, hot grease in the kitchen, and witch in the ditch; when they were alone, they got bored, and got used to it.

“The Fall of the House of Usher,”

“I am more of a rewriter than a writer,” Lee said, and explained that everything she wrote, she wrote at least three times. She claimed that while there could be “no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence,” there was also “no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed.”

But Hohoff had correctly identified the scenes with children as the strongest parts of Go Set a Watchman and The Long Good-Bye, and she thought that the young Scout would make the best narrator.

Totally agree with this

and her five favorite novels: Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Richard Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Lee’s writing voice catches like a briar; it doesn’t tear its subjects, but sticks to them.