To Kill a Mockingbird at 50

There are always a lot of books of "a certain era" that I don't think get read much anymore. My guess is that hardly anyone today reads To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A Separate Peace, The Catcher in the Rye, and many others (including the works of James Joyce) unless it is assigned to them.

For baby boomers, however, these books seem terribly important and we will be plagued with discussions of them until, as my mother used to say, the last dog is hung. A situation that I might welcome if I wasn't one of the dogs myself.

In any case, To Kill a Mockingbird is 50 years old and that has revived the usual questions about whether Truman Capote actually wrote the book. The only piece of evidence ever advanced for this is that Harper Lee never wrote another book after it. Capote never wrote anything after In Cold Blood either of course.

That said, it strikes me as a silly question. Mockingbird is one of those impassioned books. It was written because its author had to write it. Capote, on the other hand, seems like someone who never did anything (including sex) with passion. He was one of those people more interested in being a writer than actually writing. Once he was famous, he didn't have sufficient incentive to actually write anything again.

But I would think that anyone who has written would see that the authorship question is secondary to the editorship question. It is not, of course, impossible that one or the other wrote all the books but it seems far more likely that these two acted as editors for one another. And when they stopped doing that neither could do anything at all.