One of the hallmarks of a great work of literature or art is that you remember exactly where you were when you first experienced it. Which is another way of saying it becomes an indelible part of your life.
When I was 11 years old and a gym class injury confined me to several days of bed rest with black patches over both eyes, my mother, to help pass those long hours, read To Kill a Mockingbird to me from start to finish. In the temporary darkness of my physical world, Harper Lee’s fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama became my reality. The cares of Scout, Atticus, Jem, Tom, Calpurnia and Boo Radley, in Lee’s words and my mother’s voice, became my cares.
Those memories came rushing back to me with the news of Harper Lee’s death at 89 on February 19 in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama—the model for Maycomb. Yet along with the expected eulogies came a slew of questions, posed in The Atlantic, the Washington Post and elsewhere as to whether Lee went to her grave with a tragically tarnished literary reputation.
At issue was the publication in 2015 of a novel, Go Set a Watchman, which Lee wrote before 1960’s Mockingbird but had previously kept under wraps. Watchman has created a stir for two reasons: first, because it is a decidedly lesser literary work. Why would an author who steadfastly refused to publish any novels besides Mockingbird throughout her long life share this book with the world? Was she in full possession of her faculties, or being manipulated in her advanced years by others seeking a big payday? Second was the fact that Watchman featured several familiar characters, but in a much different light than readers remembered. In particular, the revered Atticus, the wise father and courageous lawyer who in Mockingbird defends a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman, comes off in Watchman as a distressingly conventional mid-20th century small town racist.
Whatever one thinks of Watchman or the decision to publish it so late in Lee’s life, the assertion that the author’s reputation has suffered a mortal blow seems wildly off base, and deserving of rebuttal. To me, the story of Harper Lee contains a few clear lessons about reputation that apply beyond literature, to any endeavor or organization—and three clear reasons why hers is secure:
Reason 1 – She built a solid foundation
Hype can create a media firestorm, but it can’t create or destroy a reputation. Amid the handwringing over her supposedly deflated legacy, I returned (as I’m sure many readers did) to Mockingbird. Reading it for the first time in years, I was gratified to find the same patient narrator, at once endlessly forgiving of human frailty, yet harsh in its assessment of ignorance and cruelty and injustice, and the same magical words—just as I remembered. Three pages in, I relaxed and enjoyed the journey, knowing that the book, its author, and Atticus (the Mockingbird Atticus) would survive any passing controversy.
Lesson: In times of turmoil, underlying qualities outweigh surface noise
Reason 2 – She never violated a trust
Not even the harshest critics of Go Set a Watchman suggest that it (or Mockingbird) was plagiarized, which at this point is about the only revelation that could truly destroy Harper Lee’s reputation. As for the idea that Watchman’s literary defects will cast a permanent shadow over Mockingbird, or Lee’s standing as a writer—history suggests otherwise. Fearing for his reputation, Nathaniel Hawthorne tried to burn every copy of his first novel, Fanshawe. Yet Fanshawe’s stubborn survival into the Kindle age has done nothing to lessen our appreciation of Hawthorne or his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter. Readers will continue to cherish Mockingbird for generations to come, and Watchman will be a footnote.
Lesson: People will forgive your imperfections, as long as you don’t lie to them.
Reason 3 – She had great reputational ambassadors
For all of the recent criticism of Lee’s controversial late-life handlers who rightly or wrongly pushed for the publication of Watchman, when it mattered most she worked with people who cared for, nurtured, and supported her reputation. Producer Alan Pakula, actor Gregory Peck, screenwriter Horton Foote and others involved in the 1962 film adaptation deeply understood Lee and her book, visited her hometown, spent time with residents and created an almost perfect cinematic rendering of the novel. Just as Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch, the book and the movie have over time become inseparable companions, each drawing new generations of admirers to the other.
Lesson: When your name is on the line, choose your associates well.
To Kill a Mockingbird, as much as any book, helped shape my conception of right and wrong, and of the power of words and books to move people. It’s one of the reasons I became a writer. As soon as my own kids were old enough, I repeated the tradition (minus the eye injury) by reading Mockingbird aloud to them.
Millions of other readers share variations on my experience. And it is the combined power of that relationship and trust between author and reader—it’s not too much to call it love—that will carry on inviolate from our own age into the next.
Charles Slack’s books include Liberty’s First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech; Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America’s First Female Tycoon, and Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock, and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century.
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