Capote wrote mockingbird?

[Jo Ann]

Harper Lee wrote TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

It is her book alone.

[Katherine]

I have often wondered about this. I would bet that she wrote it, but that she asked Truman to edit it for her, and he helped her tighten the plot line and keep the wonderful suspenseful arc. My editor helped me with my book, Shot in the Head, a Sister's Memoir, a Brother's Struggle. All editors do. Imagine having someone as talented as Truman suggesting where to start the story and what to add or leave out!

but it is still her book.

[Kate]

Monty J wrote: "Harper Lee is one of the most courageous American writers of all time, for she, like Scout, faced down her local community and shamed them, shamed all of white America, into facing their racism and bigotry."

What an ugly racist thing to say, as if only 'white' people are capable of racist behaviour. All races everywhere have racist tendencies including blacks and Asians and Hispanics.

To Kill a Mockingbird succeeded in America because white people published the book, white people sold the book and white people bought the book. Doesn't sound racist to me. Sounds like white people like a good read.

[Duane]

Welcome to the shriveled mentality of the Left: you're guilty of being white because you were born that way. On your knees and grovel before the altar of P.C., worm...

[Gary]

Well... that got weird fast.

[Anthony]

wow! pretty disgusting ignorant white people still stuck in the world Harper was writing about!!! I grew up in Alabama, I have been to Frisco City and Monroeville, and a hundred other little towns in Alabama and other southern states. Harper was brave. Truman was a talented creep, but even his talent was far less than hers. his humanity wasn't even close. Harper wrote the book, if anything she wrote one or two for him.

[Karen]

Kate wrote: "What an ugly racist thing to say, as if only 'white' people are capable of racist behaviour. All races everywhere have racist tendencies including blacks and Asians and Hispanics.

To Kill a Mockingbird succeeded in America because white people published the book, white people sold the book and white people bought the book. Doesn't sound racist to me. Sounds like white people like a good read."

Huh? You sound like you don't think black people like a good read, is that what you are saying? Are you incapable of understanding the context of the story and the time period it was written in? Do you understand your history, or are you an insensitive clod.

[Monty J]

Kate wrote: "To Kill a Mockingbird succeeded in America because white people published the book, white people sold the book and white people bought the book. Doesn't sound racist to me. Sounds like white people like a good read. "


Apparently White Supremacy is alive and well.

[Petergiaquinta]

I'm curious about Anthony's comments regarding Harper Lee's humanity versus that of Capote and how he really didn't have what it takes to write a novel like Mockingbird. Tell me more about that because my knowledge of Capote's writing is pretty slim. I've read some shorter pieces, and he leaves me cold. He's talented, but I too don't find the human touch there in his writing. Harper Lee's writing is all about the human heart and the human soul.

[Gary]

Petergiaquinta wrote: "Petergiaquinta I'm curious about Anthony's comments regarding Harper Lee's humanity versus that of Capote and how he really didn't have what it takes to write a novel like Mockingbird. Tell me more about that because my knowledge of Capote's writing is pretty slim. I've read some shorter pieces, and he leaves me cold. He's talented, but I too don't find the human touch there in his writing. Harper Lee's writing is all about the human heart and the human soul."

It's an interesting question.

I'm no scholar of Capote, though I've read a good amount of his work. In Cold Blood and the whole Tiffany's thing, plus a bunch of shorter works....

(Side note: the idea that Capote's work has been interpreted in film better than Lee's is patently absurd. I like Audrey as much as the next guy, but anybody who watches that movie and thinks George Peppard captured his role is off their nut, and I've got two words to get that last nail in the coffin: Mickey Rooney. Youch.)

Anyway, I think I'd sum this up in abstract terms. Where Lee is a kind of idealist, Capote is a fantasist. That is, Lee wrote something very close to home, and expressed a lot of idealistic concepts. Capote had no such interest--except maybe where his own smaller, personal world was concerned. His writing was much more personal. He wrote fantasy versions of his world, and the characters that he wrote well were versions of himself, or people he could see himself in. Lee was writing about people that were very different from herself, and--arguably--she idealizes them in her work.

Again, those are abstractions, so you can take or leave them. However, I would suggest that as abstractions they illustrate part of the problem with the argument that Capote had anything to do with writing To Kill a Mockingbird. Mockingbird is a "larger" work than anything Capote attempted, even his masterwork In Cold Blood. Even if Capote weren't elbows deep in his own work at the time Lee was writing her book, the core themes in them are very different, and they are as unlike one another in scope as Fitzgerald was from Hemingway.