Good friend of Truman Capote. He’d have told her to die younger.

It was an okay if overpraised book. She was the Margaret Mitchell of the Civil Rights era. White southerners were abolitionists and like that.

Gregory Peck could shoot as well as Clint Eastwood, sometimes, if the target was a dog.

The tragedy, the shame of it all, was the publishing world’s determination to present her first draft of Mockingbird as if it were a sequel. It wasn’t a sequel. It was the way things were in her time, place, and place in life.

Closer to Gone with the Wind than anyone ever imagined.

We thought it was this.

When it was really, always, this.

Sad. She shoulda died already.