Critical Praise

"Harper Lee caught the beauty of America with To Kill a Mockingbird, but has remained something of a mystery ever since. Charles J. Shields's portrait of her, Mockingbird, shows us a quietly reclusive, down-to-earth woman with an enormous gift and documents her struggle to live with that gift for the rest of her life. Shields's evocation of both the woman and her beautiful, sleepy, and smoldering South are pitch-perfect."

——Anne Rivers Siddons

"Harper Lee's intense personal privacy sets daunting limitations for a biographer, but Charles J. Shields has ingeniously recovered the feel of her childhood world of Monroeville, Alabama, and the small-town Southern customs and vivid personalities that shaped her prickly independence."

——Louise Westling, author of Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens

"An informative and genial biography that literary fiction lovers will flock to."

——Booklist