What Does Harper Lee Want?

The author’s second novel, written before To Kill a Mockingbird, is the most preordered book in her publisher’s history. It’s also a book she vowed never to publish

By Claire Suddath - Bloomberg Business - July 9, 2015

On the porch of the Meadows, a small, canary-yellow nursing home along the Highway 21 bypass in Monroeville, Ala., a security guard called Officer Matthews keeps watch. Sometimes he sits in a wooden rocking chair. Other times he leans against the porch’s white posts. In the late afternoon, when the thermometer outside the nearby Trustmark Bank reads 108F and the summer air gets so humid it’s like trying to breathe through a wet towel, he’ll take off his company-issued black blazer and wipe his brow with a handkerchief. He tries not to go indoors.

 He tries not to go indoors.
A security guard is at the nursing home 24 hours a day. It’s an odd sight in this small, insular town of 6,300, the kind of place where houses are left unlocked and everyone waves to one another on the street. The other nursing homes in town certainly don’t have such tight security. Then again, they don’t house a Pulitzer Prize winner set to release a blockbuster novel on July 14 with an initial print run of more than 2 million copies. The Meadows is home to Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Right -Lee in 2010

Photographer: Penny Weaver

At 89, Lee has lived there for several years. Before that, she had a small, rent-controlled apartment on New York’s Upper East Side. She’d ride the city buses (taxis were too extravagant, she thought), dine with friends, attend the theater or symphony, play golf, and generally pass through the world unnoticed. Lee wasn’t shy, but she didn’t want to be famous. “I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird,” she said in 1964 in her last published interview. The book had been her debut novel; she’d assumed that, like most debuts, no one would read it. Instead, it spent 98 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and earned Lee a profile in Life magazine. “Public encouragement, I hoped for a little … but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening,” Lee said at the time. She stopped granting interviews and would sometimes skip town for a few days when she learned that a reporter was trying to track her down. For years she insisted she’d never publish again.
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