12 Reading Harper Lee Toward the end of the century, her life was sadly altered by the deaths of friends, including Maurice Crain, a special man in her life—professionally and personally—who died in 1970 after a long illness. Nelle Harper did her best to provide help in his last days. In 1984 Capote died and, although they had long before parted ways, she attended his funeral. She, herself, became afflicted with macular degeneration, which began to take a toll on her ability to read. To Nelle Harper’s extreme dissatisfaction, Monroeville began to capi- talize on her novel in the 1990s. Murals were painted on buildings, a statue of Atticus was erected near the courthouse, plays of the novel were produced, and a museum opened. Nelle Harper became extremely irate over the sale of a book titled Calpurnia’s Recipes. When she asked that it be recalled, it was. In October of 1993, when Claudia Johnson, then living in Tuscaloosa, was asked to write a book for Simon and Schuster’s Twayne series on To Kill a Mockingbird, she contacted her and Nelle Harper’s mutual friend, Jim McMilllan, to be sure she got the biographical chronology correct. Nelle Harper remembered an incident just after she won the Pulitzer Prize when a Life magazine photographer was returning to New York by way of Mont- gomery. He got caught up in a fracas between protesters and police and was pushed through a glass storefront. In a letter written by Nelle Harper in March of 1998, she tells Johnson, who was going to Monroeville, that it was too bad she had to go to the town to accept an award but to grab it and get out of Monroeville as fast as possible—that the town had made her into a commodity (interview, New York City, March 28, 1998). She always referred to a “Mockingbird” mural the town had painted on the side of a building as “The Next-to-the-Last Supper.” Her Firm Decision to Avoid Further Publication Many queries and much speculation circulated about why Nelle Harper did not publish another book. She was undoubtedly working on some- thing else not too long after To Kill a Mockingbird was published—a project that mysteriously disappeared in the 1970s. In the 1980s, she started on a journalistic project called “The Reverend,” with a setting in Alexander City, Alabama. It involved a serial killer of at least five people, who was known but never convicted, and was finally murdered himself. She became deeply involved with it, gathering material and spending consid- erable time in Alexander City. She abandoned the project sometime in the late 1980s, explaining that the last straw came when a man telephoned her and offered to “sell me his grandmother” for a tidy sum of money.
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