To Bury an Author

Or 

Go Stop a Watchman

Or

To Bury a Mockingbird 

(Additional accolades for Peter)

Or

Go Set a Catafalque

(Another victory lap for Peter)

Harper Lee, the female JD Salinger in terms of reclusiveness, output and placement on summer reading lists, has died at the age of 89, causing her publisher to cut her remaining contract to 2 more books. Revered for To Kill a Mockingbird, the simplistic story of an ineffective Southern lawyer who loses a case with an obviously innocent client, who ignores a woman being raped and beaten by her father, who has to rely on his adolescent daughter to disrupt a lynch mob, and who is so little regarded by his own daughter that she calls him by his first name and doesn’t know to stand when he exits a courtroom, Lee coasted on undeserved laurels for more than 50 years before her publisher took advantage of her barely lucid state to foist Go Set a Watchman, a sequel in that it came after, but really an underdeveloped first draft of Mockingbird, on an unsuspecting and unwelcoming public. After her one-hit wonder To Kill a Mockingbird was introduced to widespread acclaim and won the Pulitzer in 1960 (and was turned into an Oscar-winning screenplay in 1962), Lee found the attention overwhelming and withdrew from publishing and public life. Or she realized that she barely had enough story for one novel, let alone a second and figured it was better to retire on top. She did help her childhood friend Truman Capote, whose mincing, effeminate, effete, awkward persona was not well-received in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959, so he brought Lee along to talk to the locals while he was researching his book about the murder of 4 members of the Clutter family, which would eventually yield the pioneering true crime book In Cold Blood.