In the late 1970s, after almost two decades of laboring to write a second novel that might live up to her first, Harper Lee turned to nonfiction.
“The defendant was black, but the lawyers were white, and so were the judge and jury,” writes Cep about the 1977 trial that fascinated Lee. It sounds familiar. Yet in this instance there was no doubt that the man being tried for a violent crime had done it. On June 18 of that year in Alexander City, Ala., Robert Burns, an African American Vietnam vet, walked into the funeral of a teenage girl named Shirley Ann Ellington and, in front of 300 witnesses, shot the Rev. Willie Maxwell three times.
Author Casey Cep. As a portrayal of the life of a writer, the section on Lee is by itself worth the price of admission. She sat in the courtroom for the trial that September, and spent more than a year doing research around Alexander City. She was no stranger to true-crime work, having traveled with Capote — her best pal growing up — on research trips to Kansas for what became “In Cold Blood.” And yet she struggled with the writing.