Afternoons with Harper Lee explores the personal side of the To Kill a Mockingbird author

To the world, Harper Lee was estranged to the point of being an unknown, obsessively reclusive person who spent most of her life avoiding the public eye, despite writing one of the best-selling books of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird. For Wayne Flint, the Alabama-born author was his girlfriend Nelle.

Flint, a longtime Southern historian who became close friends with Nelle Harper Lee near the end of her life, wrote his second book about the author, “Afternoons with Harper Lee,” which was launched Thursday with a signing of copies by Flint at a bookstore in suburban Birmingham.

Based on Flint’s notes from dozens of visits with Lee over a decade before her death in 2016, the book is like sitting on a porch and listening to stories about Lee’s childhood and family in rural Alabama, her later life in New York and everything in between. That includes the time a grandfather who fought for the Confederacy survived the Battle of Gettysburg despite heavy losses in his Alabama unit, according to Flint.

“I said to her, ‘You know, half of the 15th Alabama was either killed or wounded or captured, and he got away?’ Is this just luck or God’s providence? What on earth is this?” Flynt said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“And she said, ‘No, it’s not God’s providence. He could run fast.

The public perception of Lee as a recluse is wrong, said Flint, a former Auburn University history professor. No, she didn’t give media interviews and was fiercely private, but she was also warm and kind to friends, including former first lady Lady Bird Johnson, Flint said. And Lee was “deeply religious” in a way that many people are not, he said.

“It’s an attempt to tell the story of the authentic woman, not the marble lady,” Flint said.

The book is also a tribute to Flint’s late wife Darty, who died in 2020. Lee, who suffered a stroke in 2007, seemed to identify with the physical suffering of Darty Flint, who had Parkinson’s disease, Flint said.

“I think she tolerated me because she loved Darty,” he said.

Born in 1926, when the South was still racially segregated by law, Lee grew up in the southern Alabama town of Monroeville, the daughter of a lawyer who served as the model for lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, a story about race. injustice and the law during the Jim Crow era. The town itself became Maycomb, the setting of the book.

Preferring soccer, softball, golf and books to small-town socials or college clubs, Lee’s well-known desire for solitude may have come in part from a sense of being different from others who grew up around her in the South, Flint said.

“I think she inhabited a world where she felt she wasn’t like the other girls,” he said.

A childhood friend of fellow writer Truman Capote, Lee was rarely heard from in public after her semi-autobiographical Mockingbird won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was made into a hit movie. She lived mostly in a Manhattan apartment, where it was easier to blend in than at home, until a stroke left her partially paralyzed.

Flint and his late wife knew Lee’s two sisters and became close to the author after she moved back to Alabama for good after her stroke. They visited her in a rehabilitation center in Birmingham and then in an assisted living home in Monroeville, where she spent years before her death. Lee died just months after the publication of her novel Go Set a Watchman, which was actually an early version of Mockingbird.

The book does not go into the most personal aspects of Lee’s life; Flint said they just don’t discuss things like that. But it tells of the worsening isolation of deafness and blindness towards the end of her life; her love of gambling; the furor surrounding “Straj”; and her authorship of an as-yet-unpublished manuscript about a strange murder case in central Alabama.

Lee was steeped in literature and religion, Flint said. She preferred the King James Version of the Bible to all others because of its lyrical language, he said, and her favorite authors included Jane Austen and C.S. Lewis.

“When she died, on her ottoman in her two little rooms was the complete anthology of all the books of C.S. Lewis. She must have weighed 50 pounds,” he said.

Afternoons With Harper Lee is a sequel to Flint’s Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee. While the first book was based on letters between the two, the new book is more meandering and conversational than the first in the tradition of Southern storytelling.

“Letters are lifeless compared to stories,” he said.