Capote wrote mockingbird?

[Carrie]

Do you think Truman Capote wrote To Kill A Mockingbird?

[Anna]

No. It's easy to think that he did, since he and Harper Lee grew up together. I don't think he wrote To Kill A Mockingbird. That's just a rumour.

[Monty J]

Carrie wrote: "Do you think Truman Capote wrote To Kill A Mockingbird?"

Harper Lee was fiercely independent and would not have sought, nor allowed Capote to do her work. Capote, on the other hand, would have demanded credit for anything he did. He may have read a draft and given her comments, but nothing more. Truman Capote was too self-absorbed to have helped anyone at much of anything.

In fact, it was the other way around. Harper helped Truman with In Cold Blood.

Anyone reading Haper Lee's biography, Mockingbird, knows that she had a New York editor who worked closely with her on TKM. After finishing TKM she traveled with Truman to the small town near the farm where the murders were committed and worked as his research assistant, probably for no pay.

Truman had such a difficult personality that people wouldn't talk to him. Harper interceded, smoothing things over, and earned him friendly access to key sources, like the sheriff and his wife.

Capote hardly mentioned Harper in his acknowledgements. The book should have been dedicated to her.

[Zora]

Monty has it right. Ms. Lee should be still getting paychecks for In Cold Blood. It's sexism, I suppose, that puts the rumor the wrong way around.

She has some articles and so forth that were published, and you can check that prose style against Mockingbird.

[Carrie]

Yeah. Exactly Monty, great comments. I will check out that bio. Thanks!!

[Monty J]

Carrie wrote: "Yeah. Exactly Monty, great comments. I will check out that bio. Thanks!!"

You're welcome.

You will find that Harper did in fact have excellent editorial assistance and more than a little moral support. She had given up one winter and threw her manuscript out the window into the snow, then phoned her editor to say she was quitting. He talked her out of it and she retrieved the manuscript.

This is a testament to the difficulty of not only a first novel, but one that put her through emotional hell because of TKM's assault on her family, friends and neighbors and their bigoted Southern ways.

Guts? Harper Lee's courage cannot be overstated. She is a literary giant who can only grow in stature with time. Her funeral will be broadcast worldwide like a head of state.

[Petergiaquinta]

View the documentary Hey Boo; it's a great treatment of Lee and the novel. In it, they interview the Browns, the couple in New York who gave her the Christmas present of a lifetime, enough money for her to quit her crappy job in New York as an airline ticket counter agent to work on her stories and put them together into what eventually becomes the first draft of Mockingbird, a book she first titled Atticus. She had tremendous help from her editor and publisher; that is what happens in the writing industry. Apparently Lee's first efforts read more like a collection of short stories than a unified whole.

But she is clearly the author, and do you think a little bitch like Truman Capote would sit quietly by while she gained such tremendous acclaim? Capote never wrote anything as good as Mockingbird, and it ate him up inside; the documentary talks about this as well. But that was simple jealousy, not resentment for her getting the credit for a book he wrote. Think about Capote...he spent the entire 1970s dishing dirt on everyone and everything he knew, going from talk show to talk show, writing bitchy little pieces in whatever magazine would publish them. Do you think he would keep something like he was the real author of Mockingbird a secret? Not that guy.

[Monty J]

Petergiaquinta wrote: "View the documentary Hey Boo; it's a great treatment of Lee and the novel. In it, they interview the Browns, the couple in New York who gave her the Christmas present of a lifetime, enough money for her to quit her crappy job..."

Thanks for the tip. Can't wait to see it.

We all owe the Browns a debt of grattitude.

[Carrie]

Ohhh , me either!! Cant wait to see it. And Peter...youre right. Capote woulda been yelling it from the mountain top if he wrote TKM,lol.

[Susie]

I fully agree that Capote would not have not claimed credit for TKAM, which is much better than any of his books, except maybe Breakfast at Tiffany's

[One]

I wouldn't say To Kill a Mockingbird is better than any of Capote's books. In Cold Blood is a work of art, it's definitely a matter of taste as to which work you prefer, but I admire Capote over Harper.

Of course I don't doubt for a second that Harper wrote TKAM, which she deserves a lot of credit for.

[Jaksen]

There are programs to ascertain, with a fairly high degree of certainty, who wrote what. (If the writer has a few book, articles, etc., to compare with.) For example, JK's recent book was discovered using this method, which she was quite upset about as she'd written it under a pseudonym.

So I suppose one might be able to 'prove' that Capote didn't write TKM.

On the other hand, I watched a lot of talk shows as a younger person, those which were on in the late afternoon. I recall seeing Capote on a number of them and if he, in any way, could have claimed an iota of responsibility in the writing of TKM, even if it was just editorial help, he would have. He was a fascinating character, but a notorious publicity hound.

I have no doubt TKM was written by Harper Lee. Her writing style is very diff. from Capote's. (And I am reading In Cold Blood now. I am not enraptured by it, but it's a good read.)