Casey Cep.
CASEY CEP: harper lee biography
FURIOUS HOURS: MURDER, FRAUD AND THE LAST TRIAL OF HARPER LEE (2019)
Shortlisted for the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize.
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OUTLINE
Casey Cep describes a fascinating episode late in the life of Harper Lee - the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, and one of the most famous writers in the USA. Cep recounts how in later life Harper Lee was drawn to, and planned to write about, the case of Willie Maxwell. The Reverend Maxwell was a rural preacher who put on trial for the murder of five of his family for their insurance money. He escaped conviction, but was dead at the funeral of his last victim. Maxwell’s murderer was tried and, despite there being numerous witnesses, he was acquitted. Harper Lee spent a year in Alabama reporting on the Maxwell case, and many years trying, without success, to finish the book. Cep has taken up the task that defeated Harper Lee, and has produced an outstanding work.
Time Magazine’s Lucas Wittman wrote of the book: "In elegant prose, [Cep] gives us the fullest story yet of Lee’s post-Mockingbird life ... an account emotionally attuned to the toll that great writing takes, and shows that sometimes one perfect book is all we can ask for, even while we wish for another."
MEET THE AUTHOR
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Casey Kep (born 1985) is an American journalist and author, who is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine. She lives on the eastern shore of Maryland with her wife Kathryn Schulz, also a New Yorker staff writer, and their baby daughter. Cep obtained a degree in English from Harvard University, and obtained an M.Phil in theolory at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
