Summary

After the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, people speculated about what Lee would write next, and many people claimed that they had information about her unfinished book. Although she stopped working on The Reverend, Lee did not stop writing, with hundreds of letters as testament. In her letters, Cep says that she “wrote with the ear of Eudora Welty, the eye of Walker Evans, the precision of John Donne, the wit of Dorothy Parker, and, often the length of George Eliot” (257).

But still, whatever she claimed to write, Lee did not publish anything. Cep explores the reasons why Lee struggled to write, saying that although she did drink too much there is “no reason to believe that her drinking was a cause rather than effect of her inability to write” (259-260). She had hundreds of ideas about things to...