STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Harper Lee Dies At 89 Years Old R. I. P.

However, in no way is her one and only book, written primarily by her Lippincott editor, Tay Hohoff, To Kill A Mockingbird…. an American Classic! I will riff off of the obituary column about this southern writer, Harper Lee, who could only write one book, Go Set a Watchman, which was nothing more than a series of short stories and impressions of the deep south, really but a “.. child’s book” [Flannery O’Connor, Southern Gothic novelist].

I am not going to attack Harper Lee because she did what she was supposed to do: write a best-selling novel. Instead, Lee’s more ambitious/talented Lippincott editor,  Tay Hohoff, rewrote the entire proposal that Harper had submitted to her editor about a Southern lawyer [Lee’s father] defending the blacks; while, at the same time, “affiliating himself with raving anti-integrationists, anti-black crazies…”

Ms. Lee, who had never married in her eighty plus years, nor produced any sort of literary body of work,  because “she was ostensibly  paralyzed by fear” was immediately  canonized by the liberal institutions such as the teachers guild and the NY Times and other esteemed magazines as an “American Classical writer”. The truth of the matter, is that she never was nor will ever be an American Classic.

The reason is simple. One book selling over 40 million copies over a certain period of time is considered “a NYTimes Best-Selling Novel”…not a “Classic”. In fact, the novel itself is so simplistic and inaccurate that her real novel, “Go Set A Watchman” which was highly conservative and portrayed the Alabama small town life as it really was: nasty, bigoted and without any form of redemption, was completely rejected and transmuted into a beatific vision of moral courage.

The issue at hand is the power of the northeastern intellectual elite to determine what is or what is not an “American classic”.. or even our so-called, American History. Remember: History and Classics are determined by the ruling elite so as to indoctrinate the students in “progressive theories.”  Think about the sometimes boring, mostly not true books that you were forced to read as a kid, (i.e. Diary of Anne Frank, biography of Abraham Lincoln). I was fortunate enough to read Rudyard Kipling, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ernest Hemingway and most important of all, Margaret Mitchell while, the teachers in public school [men] were singing in a falsetto tone the misbegotten merits of some ethereal writer like, Harper Lee.

Let me assure you from over thirty years of being a so-called, “NY Times Best Selling Author”, along with my former partner, Tom Clancy, neither one of us can be considered an  “American Classic”.

Why?
We both were commercial writers, whose primary interest was to generate as much income as possible; creating content that most Americans would buy at a fair market price which everyone could afford [about six to nine dollars]. As Tom Clancy once boldly stated to the then President of Walt Disney, Bob Iger: “We may not be the best writers in America; but, we certainly knew what our audiences want to read.”  We were rejected for our new TV series called, “The White House”—eventually it became Aaron Sorkin’s “West Wing”.

I would be interested to see what would happen, if I, and others, who have read Margaret Mitchell’s brilliant novel, Gone with the Wind; suddenly declared that she was the “one of the greatest American writers” in the 20^th Century. Ms. Mitchell wrote extensively about the trauma that both the black/white south endured during the barbarous, chaotic period euphemistically called, “The Reconstruction.” I am certain that Margaret Mitchell will be noted mainly as the novelist who wrote the book for the eponymous movie… and nothing else.

If you think that I have gone astray, then ask yourselves… who was the greatest black author in both the 20^th and 19th Centuries?

It’s a Russian by the name of Alexander Pushkin! He was a poet, playwright and novelist born in St. Petersburg, Russia. He is still considered the founder of modern  Russian Literature. But his father was an “African page given as a gift to Peter the Great”.

Bye-Bye Mockingbird! 

Hello, Gone With The Wind!