The story of Truman and Harper Lee – Vanguardia.com.mx

In real life, Truman and Nelle pretended to be novelists. A.C. Lee gave them a typewriter, and took turns using it and tell a story. Collaboration, real or imagined, never finished. Both emigrated to New York. Truman, embarked at an early literary career wunderkind literature after World War II. Nelle, working for an airline and secretly preparing his masterpiece.

In autumn 1959, after two years of corrections, reissues and rewrites, Harper Lee delivered the manuscript of “To Kill a Mockingbird” JB to publishing Lippincott. A few days later, Truman Capote read in The New York Times the news of the murder of a farm family in Holcomb, a town in Kansas. He called his childhood friend and invited her to accompany him to the scene to prepare an article for The New Yorker.?

Truman believed that a detailed account of a real event, but made with journalistic techniques narrated with the tools of fiction, write the great novel that he needed to go down in history of the Kansas literatura.?

En 1959, “part of the country as foreign to him as the steppes Russian “, Clarke writes in his biography, Capote, Truman seemed an alien. Some, in Holcomb, even suspected he -dandi, extravangante- asesino.?

“Truman was not fit, and no one spoke to him, “he said years later Harold Nye, one of the detectives on the case . “But Nelle came out and made the connection with people. Struggled and managed contacts with local, and could introduce Truman, “Nye said.

No Nelle, Truman would not have broken the distrust of the locals. Without it, probably would not have agreed to the decisive source for his story, the agent Alvin Dewey. Nelle worked closely with Truman in interviews and investigative journalism as a Woodward and Bernstein early or about Holmes and Watson. No exaggeration to say that without Nelle Harper Lee, “In Cold Blood” -the nonfiction novel, a new genus, he consecrated Capote would not have existed.

Not since the playground in Monroeville the collaboration was so close. I never would be.?
Mockingbird (Nightingale, unauthorized biography of Harper Lee), Shields describes Nelle surprise when in January 1966 he opened a copy of the newly published “In Cold Blood”. The only recognition of all his work was on the dedication. And it was shared: “For Jack Dunphy (Capote’s partner) and
Harper Lee, with my love and gratitude.” Nothing more.

“That Truman had not appreciated was an oversight or neglect. Was a betrayal, “Shields writes. Capote invited his old friend to the legendary party held at the Plaza in New York on 28 November 1966. Lee did not attend.

The problem was not only that Capote did not adequately recognize the contribution of Lee to “in cold blood”. Accumulated grievances. “To Kill a Mockingbird” it became a bestseller. Hollywood shot a film version. Lee won the Pulitzer, which some biographers fed Capote’s jealousy, which never got it.