Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

Nelle Lee (1926-2016), better known by her middle name Harper, was an American writer from Alabama. Her claim to fame is To Kill a Mockingbird (1961), a novel narrated by a girl who learns about the meaning of justice and racism during the 1930s as she watches her father defend a black man accused of raping a white woman.

In Furious Hours Casey Cep sketches out Lee’s beginnings as a footloose girl who grew up playing with her friend Truman Capote; she then details how the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird transformed Lee’s life. The novel’s success made Lee wealthy, very famous, and quite unhappy. Over the course of 20 years, Lee lost the collaborators—editors, agents, and friends—who helped her bring To Kill a Mockingbird to fruition. Cep describes how this isolation and lack of support stymied Lee’s productivity. Cep’s portrait of Lee is one of a suffering but initially successful artist.

In the late 1970s Lee determined to begin work on her second book, which was to be about Willie Maxwell, a black serial killer who was executed at the funeral of one of his apparent victims. Cep describes Lee at this stage as hopeful about the possibility of turning this complex story into a true-crime book that was more factual than Capote’s In Cold Blood and that also represented the complexity of Southern racial politics.