Steve Flowers: Dr. Wayne Flynt’s “Afternoons with Harper Lee”
Renowned Alabama historian Dr. Wayne Flynt has chronicled and penned a marvelous book appropriately entitled Afternoons with Harper Lee. This gem is published by New South Books with editing by Randall Williams. It is receiving worldwide acclaim. If you are a fan of Harper Lee and her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, it is a great read. Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville in 1926 and died in Monroeville ninety years later in 2016. It was fitting that Dr. Wayne Flynt would give her eulogy. Her book, To Kill A Mockingbird, is one of the five most bought and read books in the history of the world. It is second only to the Bible in most countries. In secular Great Britain, it surpasses the Bible and is number one. Dr. Wayne Flynt is probably the most significant and accomplished historian of Alabama history in my lifetime. He taught history to over 60,000 undergraduate and graduate students at Auburn University for over 28 years. He was beloved, and he loves Auburn. He is very proud of his 43 car tag, as he often told Nelle’s accomplished sister Alice. Dr. Flynt taught history at Samford University for 12 years before beginning his 28 years at Auburn University. During his illustrious career of 40 years, he authored 14 books, all centered around Southern politics, history, and Southern culture. He is very proud of his heritage of being the son of a sharecropper and growing up in the Appalachian culture of rural Calhoun County. It is so poetic that the most renowned southern Alabama historian of this century would write the most revealing and detailed history of Alabama and arguably the world’s most famous author of this century. He tells Nelle Harper Lee’s story explicitly and with authenticity. Dr. Flynt and his beloved wife, Dorothy “Dartie,” of 60 years, became Harper Lee’s best friends in the twilight of her life. Wayne and Dartie Flynt journeyed from Auburn to Monroeville and spent 64 afternoons over 12 years visiting and chronicling Harper Lee’s life story as she lived in a modest retirement home in Monroeville even though the royalties from the book were over a million dollars a year. The book is part memoir and part biography. It truly tells the intimate story of legendary author Harper Lee. It encompasses her life and intertwines it with Alabama history. It is like we Alabamians like to say, “They were sitting on a big front porch swapping life stories.” Flynt and Lee were both Southern storytellers. They were often joined by Nelle Harper Lee’s two sisters, Alice Lee and Louise Lee Conner. Alice Lee was ten years older than Nelle and was famous in her own right. She was one of the first female lawyers in Alabama. She was one of Monroeville’s most prominent lawyers for close to 80 years. She practiced law until she was over 100 years old and was a leader in the Alabama Methodist Church. Louise Conner introduced the Flynt’s to Nelle Harper. They met at a History and Heritage Festival in Eufaula in 1983. Nelle Harper Lee was the classic recluse. She was very private and very secretive; she liked to drink and curse and speak her mind. She never married and never really dated. She wore frumpy, dowdy, non-stylish clothing and disdained being around people and speaking in public. She lived most of her life in her modest apartment in New York City. She lived there mostly from ages 23-81, 58 years, with only brief journeys home to Monroeville, Alabama, by train as she did not fly. New York City gave her the anonymity she desired. The book tells of her celebrity and meeting other famous people who desired to meet her, including Presidents Lyndon Johnson, George Bush, and Barack Obama. She especially liked Lady Bird Johnson, who also had Alabama roots. She adored Gregory Peck, who was the star of the movie To Kill A Mockingbird. He won an Oscar and every award imaginable for his role as Atticus Finch in the movie. Only after a stroke in 2007 at 81 did Nelle Harper Lee return home to Monroeville. Dr. Flynt is also an accomplished ordained Baptist preacher. He is a true kind-hearted gentleman who speaks kindly of everyone in his book. He and Dartie grew to love the foul-tempered, eccentric, cynical, opinionated, irascible, uninhibited, very private, and reclusive author. He discerns and captures her true humility. She really felt and often said modestly, “But all I did was write a book.” She wrote a pretty good one, and so did Flynt. See you next week. Steve Flowers is Alabama’s leading political columnist. His weekly column appears in over 60 Alabama newspapers. He served 16 years in the state legislature. Steve may be reached at: www.steveflowers.us.
Harper Lee “would be extremely upset” with Donald Trump rhetoric, “Scout” says
The actress who portrayed the iconic role of Scout onscreen in Harper Lee‘s classic tale “To Kill A Mockingbird” decried the “inflammatory and divisive” rhetoric of Donald Trump, saying the late Lee would not have approved, either. “I think she would be extremely upset with some of our politicians who are not being realistic, and who are pulling this country apart,” said Mary Badham, who was 10 when she appeared as “Scout” with Oscar winner Gregory Peck in the 1962 film. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Lee, who passed away this past Friday at 89, became close to Badham in the final years of her life, she told WJCT. Badham will make a couple of North Florida appearances on Saturday (details below). She speaks regularly across the country about the book and film’s timeless themes of tolerance and compassion in the face of bigotry. “We’re a country made up of a lot of different kinds of people, and that’s part of what makes us very strong. We have to learn to come together as a country, and not listen to racism and bigotry. It’s sad for me because we’ve come so far, and yet there are still some of us who are stuck in the Dark Ages. And I don’t want to go back there.” “This is not just a black-and-white, 1930’s race issue. This is global. This is bigotry and racism in all its forms. We have to fight against that continually. The crux of that is education. If we fail to educate our population, then ignorance takes over. “I’m just hoping the American public will do their homework in this next election, and really pay attention to the ugliness that’s happening in our political situation, and try to go for the high road. We’ve never been in a more dangerous situation than we are right now. “I’m thinking mostly of Donald Trump. He is so inflammatory and so divisive, he would not be good for this country.” Badham will appear 10 a.m. Saturday in Balis Park and the San Marco Bookstore, where there will be book signings for “To Kill A Mockingbird” and Lee’s 2015 release of “Go Set A Watchman.” The copies will be signed by both Badham and Harper Lee. Saturday evening, she’ll host a talk and screening of “Mockingbird” at the St. Augustine Amphitheatre. Both events are free.
Harper Lee, “To Kill a Mockingbird” author, has died at 89
Harper Lee, the elusive novelist whose child’s-eye view of racial injustice in a small Southern town, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” became standard reading for millions of young people and an Oscar-winning film, has died. She was 89. Lee died peacefully Thursday, publisher HarperCollins said in a statement Friday. It did not give any other details about how she died. “The world knows Harper Lee was a brilliant writer but what many don’t know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness. She lived her life the way she wanted to — in private — surrounded by books and the people who loved her,” Michael Morrison, head of HarperCollins U.S. general books group, said in the statement. For most of her life, Lee divided her time between New York City, where she wrote the novel in the 1950s, and her hometown of Monroeville, which inspired the book’s fictional Maycomb. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” published in 1960, is the story of a girl nicknamed Scout growing up in a Depression-era Southern town. A black man has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and Scout’s father, the resolute lawyer Atticus Finch, defends him despite threats and the scorn of many. The book quickly became a best-seller, won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a memorable movie in 1962, with Gregory Peck winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus. As the civil rights movement grew, the novel inspired a generation of young lawyers, was assigned in high schools all over the country and was a popular choice for citywide, or nationwide, reading programs. By 2015, its sales were reported by HarperCollins to be more than 40 million worldwide, making it one of the most widely read American novels of the 20th century. When the Library of Congress did a survey in 1991 on books that have affected people’s lives, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was second only to the Bible. Lee herself became more mysterious as her book became more famous. At first, she dutifully promoted her work. She spoke frequently to the press, wrote about herself and gave speeches, once to a class of cadets at West Point. But she began declining interviews in the late 1960s and, until late in her life, firmly avoided making any public comment at all about her novel or her career. Other than a few magazine pieces for Vogue and McCall’s in the 1960s and a review of a 19th-century Alabama history book in 1983, she published no other book until stunning the world in 2015 by permitting “Go Set a Watchman” to be released. “Watchman” was written before “Mockingbird” but was set 20 years later, using the same location and many of the same characters. Readers and reviewers were disheartened to find an Atticus who seemed nothing like the hero of the earlier book. The man who defied the status quo in “Mockingbird” was now part of the mob in “Watchman,” denouncing the Supreme Court’s ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional and denouncing blacks as unfit to enjoy full equality. But despite unenthusiastic reviews and questions whether Lee was well enough to approve the publication, “Watchman” jumped to the top of best-seller lists within a day of its announcement and remained there for months. Much of Lee’s story is the story of “Mockingbird,” and how she responded to it. She wasn’t a bragger, like Norman Mailer, or a drinker, like William Faulkner, or a recluse or eccentric. By the accounts of friends and Monroeville townsfolk, she was a warm, vibrant and witty woman who enjoyed life, played golf, read voraciously and got about to plays and concerts. She just didn’t want to talk about it before an audience. Claudia Durst Johnson, author of a book-length critical analysis of Lee’s novel, described her as preferring to guard her privacy “like others in an older generation, who didn’t go out and talk about themselves on Oprah or the Letterman show at the drop of a hat.” According to Johnson, Lee also complained that the news media invariably misquoted her. Lee emerged more often over the past few years, although not always in ways she preferred. She was involved in numerous legal disputes over the rights to her book and denied she had cooperated with the biography “The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee,” by Marja Mills. Other occasions were happier. She wrote a letter of thanks in 2001 when the Chicago Public Library chose “Mockingbird” for its first One Book, One Chicago program. In 2007, she agreed to attend a White House ceremony at which she received a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Around the same time, she wrote a rare published item — for O, The Oprah Magazine — about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town, and remained one. “Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books,” she wrote. By 2014, she had given in to the digital age and allowed her novel to come out as an e-book, calling it “‘Mockingbird’ for a new generation.” A new play adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” will land on Broadway during the 2017-18 season under the direction of Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher, written by Oscar-winner written by Aaron Sorkin. Born in Monroeville, Alabama, Nelle Harper Lee was known to family and friends as Nelle (pronounced Nell) — the name of a relative, Ellen, spelled backward. Like Atticus Finch, her father was a lawyer and state legislator. One of her childhood friends was Truman Capote, who lived with relatives next door to the Lees for several years. (A book about Lee in 2006 and two films about Capote brought fresh attention to their friendship, including her contributions to Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” the classic “nonfiction novel” about the murder of a Kansas farm family. Capote became the model for Scout’s creative, impish and loving
