‘To To Kill a Mockingbird’ Author Repudiates Journalist’s Memoir About Her

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Harper Lee, the tight-lipped author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” issued a short statement through her sister’s law firm on Wednesday saying that she had nothing to do with a coming book written about her by a former Chicago Tribune reporter.

On Tuesday, Penguin Press announced that it had acquired “The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee,” a memoir by the former reporter, Marja Mills, that was “written with direct access to Harper and Alice Lee and their friends and family.”

Penguin’s announcement said, “The story of Mills’s friendship with the two women recounts all the Lee sisters have to say about their life in Alabama, their upbringing, how ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ impacted their lives, and why Harper Lee chose to never write another novel.”

One day later, the law firm, Barnett, Bugg, Lee & Carter in Monroeville, Ala., issued the statement. Signed by Harper Lee, it said: “Contrary to recent news reports, I have not willingly participated in any book written or to be written by Marja Mills. Neither have I authorized such a book. Any claims otherwise are false.”

A receptionist at the law firm said on Wednesday that no one there had anything further to say on the subject. In an interview late Wednesday, Miriam Altshuler, Ms. Mills’s literary agent, said Ms. Mills “has the written support of Alice Lee and a lifelong family friend, and prior to Harper Lee’s stroke in 2007, she had the verbal support of Harper Lee.”

Ms. Mills wrote a long article for The Chicago Tribune in 2002 on Harper Lee. While Ms. Lee declined to comment for the piece, Ms. Mills wrote that “over the past year, through extensive reporting and rare interviews with Harper Lee’s older sister, Alice Finch Lee, and some of Harper Lee’s close friends, all of whom granted unprecedented access to the details of the author’s life, a portrait of a remarkable woman emerged.”

Harper Lee, whose book is frequently included in lists of the greatest novels of the 20th century, never wrote another and has not given a public interview in 45 years.