Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, by Charles J. Shields

As you may know from spending any amount of time on Facebook.com, To Kill A Mockingbird comes up again and again as a favorite book. One of the most-assigned books in high school, and the best-selling novel of the twentieth century, To Kill A Mockingbird has reached heights of fame never anticipated by its author, Harper Lee. Mockingbird, Shields' biography of Harper Lee, whose real first name is Nelle (a backwards spelling of a relative's name, Ellen), explores the woman behind the book as well as the forces that influenced her writing - in particular, her father A.C. Lee, on whom Atticus Finch is based. Raised as the daughter of a prominent lawyer in small-town Alabama, Lee dropped out of law school and moved to New York City to attempt a career in writing. It was there that, with the encouragement and financial backing of two friends, she wrote To Kill A Mockingbird. At this point in her life, Nelle is somewhat of a recluse, refusing to grant interviews and appearances to pretty much everyone. As a result, the sources Shields uses are the people around her and the print material he found researching at libraries across the country. Still, I finished the book with a strong sense of who Nelle really is - how spunky she was as a child and young adult, how close she once was to another famous writer and neighbor in Alabama, Truman Capote, and how baffled she was with the success that came from her first and only novel. If you're curious about the woman who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird or about the writing process of a successful writer (I sure was), I highly recommend this book.