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Harper Lee lives! The author of To Kill a Mockingbird is 81. She divides her time between Monroeville, Alabama, where she was born, and Manhattan, where she long ago shared literary bohemia with her childhood friend Truman Capote.
Lee wrote only one novel. Most of us read it at school, parked it on a bookshelf and assumed that she was dead. The Oscar-winning film Capote has, however, stirred some strange ghosts in the dusty archives of the New Yorker magazine's legendary fact-checking department.
In the film Lee accompanies Truman Capote to Kansas to research and write his masterpiece, In Cold Blood, on commission from the magazine. That happened. But the old crowd weaned on fact-checking has eyebrows arched at the film version, and in particular
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Upstate Downstate
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The famously reclusive author Harper Lee is still not doing interviews
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at the role and nature of the magazine's editor William Shawn.
Shawn's two sons wrote to the New Yorker to reveal that Dad would never have done this, that or the other. Hollywood made it all up! That prompted the first known public utterance from Harper Lee since 1966: an 82-word letter to the same magazine. Among the outrages: "The film has me talk to Mr Shawn on the telephone - I didn't."
I wanted to know more. How did Shawn, a man of stunning pomposity, manage to make recluses of such celebrated acolytes as JD Salinger and Lee herself?
But Lee's telephone numbers are unlisted, and I am told that even if I catch the old girl out shopping at Monroeville's Piggly Wiggly supermarket, she will answer no questions. 
FIRST
POSTED MAY 2, 2006
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