Mockingbird Two

Here are a few tidbits and quotes from or about Nelle Harper Lee that I liked.

She wrote the foreword to the 35th anniversary edition of TKAM in 1993: "Please spare Mockingbird an Introduction...As a reader I loathe introductions. To novels, I associate Introductions with long-gone authors and works that are being brought back into print after decades of internment. 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 without preamble."

"If I hear a consonant, I look around." (This was regarding her Southern drawl)

"Inside the entryway of the Lee's one-story brick ranch house are photographs of family members. But everywhere else are books: in a bookcase that takes up half the entrance hallway; in Alice's bedroom, off the kitchen; and in Nelle's blue bedroom at the end of the hallway. In her room, the walls are devoted to built-in white bookshelves, floor to ceiling. There is a third bedroom, a guest bedroom, and it has bookshelves, too." Her sister Alice said, "All she [Nelle] needs is a good bed, a bathroom and a typewriter...Books are the things she cares about."

As it should be.