I Am Scout Read Online Free PDF Page B

the records of the trials and took notes on the setting. Then she shifted to her sister Louise’s house in Eufaula for three months. Louise, though never especially interested in her sister’s writing, was glad for company because her husband, Herschel, was in poor health. During the next few years, Nelle would call Radney with updates on how the book was progressing, sometimes saying that it was practically done. “The galleys are at the publishers; it should be published in about a week,” she would say. But nothing materialized.
    Impatient with being put off about the book any longer, Radney went to New York to retrieve his files. After that, he gradually stopped hearing from Nelle. “Don’t bring up writing,” a friend of hers cautioned William Smart, a college professor whose creative writing classes Nelle had addressed years earlier. “She’s very sensitive about that.” 10
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    Nelle’s conflicted feelings about writing, the past, and the invasiveness of publicity came to a head in 1988 with the publication of Gerald Clarke’s bestselling Capote: A Biography. Reminiscing to Clarke, a former reporter for Time magazine, about growing up next door to the Lees, Truman told tales about the family and Mrs. Lee’s emotional problems. “When they talk about Southern grotesque, they’re not kidding!” 11
    Nelle was outraged. There was no more vulnerable and painful side of her life he could have touched on. “I hope you read the book with a salt-shaker at your side,” she wrote to Caldwell Delaney, an old friend and former director of the Museum of Mobile. 12
    Truman’s vicious lie—that my mother was mentally unbalanced and tried twice to kill me (that gentle soul’s reward for having loved him)—was the first example of his legacy to his friends. Truman left, in the book, something hateful and untrue about every one of them, which more than anything should tell you what was plain to us for more than the last fifteen years of his life—he was paranoid to a terrifying degree. Drugs and alcohol did not cause his insanity, they were the result of it.
    If you found yourself in a Monroeville that was strange to you, remember that Gerald Clarke was on his own for the first time, without the fact-checking services of TIME, Inc., and relied on information from Truman’s relatives!
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    Protecting her legacy became important to Nelle, as the chances of her publishing again seemed more and more unlikely. At one point, her cousin Dickie Williams asked her, “When are you going to come out with another book?” And she said, “Richard, when you’re at the top there’s only one way to go.” 13 She meant down in readers’ esteem.
    Meanwhile, her hometown, Monroeville, had realized its singular advantage as the birthplace of the author who had written one of the most popular and truly influential novels of the 20 th century. By 1988 , the National Council of Teachers of English reported that To Kill a Mockingbird was taught in 74 percent of the nation’s public schools. Only Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Huckleberry Finn were assigned more often. In addition, Monroeville enjoyed a second distinction as the setting for the novel, which no other town could claim.
    So in 1990 , the 30 th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Monroeville staged its first production of the play based on the novel, adapted and licensed for amateur theatrical use by Christopher Sergel, owner of Dramatic Publishing. As far back as 1965 , Sergel had persuaded Annie Laurie that “Schools all across the country continue to write to us with requests for a dramatization of To Kill a Mockingbird —it is much more requested than any other book.” 14 Thus Monroeville was tardy in embracing its literary heritage by 25 years, but eager to see what the local response would