Ahead Of New Harper Lee Book, ‘Mockingbird’ Praises Continue
Marja Mills is interviewed by “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes.
Next month, a second Harper Lee novel will be published in a busy time of retrospectives devoted to the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
It’s been nearly a year since Marja Mills published a book about the reclusive Lee, now 89 years old and living in a nursing home in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.
That’s the town where Mills spent 18 months in the mid-2000s, as she got to know the author of the celebrated “To Kill a Mockingbird” through her sister, Alice Lee.
Mills, who is appearing Thursday at the Carter Center, is the author of “The Mockingbird Next Door,” which recently came out in paperback.
It is less a biography of Harper Lee than a memoir of Mills’ time as a neighbor of the Lee sisters.
Mills’ Deep South sojourn was considered remarkable, given Harper Lee’s strong aversion to publicity and to journalists.
Indeed, Mills’ book generated some controversy as Harper Lee, who suffered a stroke after its publication, denied she cooperated with Mills, a former reporter for The Chicago Tribune.
Mills and her publisher have refuted those claims. In an interview on “City Lights,” Mills said she was concerned with respecting the wishes of the Lee sisters as she understood them.
“I have such gratitude and affection for both of them,” Mills said. “This book ends up a chronicle of the last chapter of life as they knew it.”
The second Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” was written before “To Kill a Mockingbird.” As NPR’s Debbie Elliott reported in May, the new novel has generated a different kind of controversy in Monroeville.
Also on “City Lights,” host Lois Reitzes discussed the 1962 film version of “To Kill A Mockingbird” with Emory professor Eddy von Mueller.
The role of Southern country lawyer Atticus Finch was played by Gregory Peck, a performance von Mueller said the actor was proud to hail in a glittering career.
Von Mueller said the film was a triumph, given Hollywood’s ambivalence about the treatment of American racial relations on the big screen.
Finch was defending a black man accused of raping a white girl in the 1930s in a story presented to the American public at the early years of the civil rights movement.
“This was seen as a risky film,” von Mueller said. “It’s not the kind of film you would expect a studio to make.”Emory film professor Eddy von Mueller discusses the movie “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
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