Stalking three lions of the literary canon

REVIEWS BY ALISON HOOD

The lives of three gifted writers, all of whom wrote literary masterworks early in their careers, are placed under the microscope in these new biographies.

Not ready for her close-up

Charles J. Shields, a journalist and author of nonfiction for young readers, blends techniques of fiction and creative investigative reporting in Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. No prior biography of Lee exists, and Shields has written a largely imagined rendering of the reclusive, famously feisty author's life. Lee, now 79 and living in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, declined to speak with Shields or verify his research. The result is a book that, in Shields' words, "aims to capture a life but is not a conventional biography." Which begs the question: Do we really need to know Ms. Lee's innermost thoughts, isn't it enough that she wrote a worthy book that continues to inspire?

Shields' narrative earns A's for effort and for his evocation of the Depression-era South. Also, he clearly respects the importance of To Kill a Mockingbird, mining its pages for clues to Lee's life. Less effective, however, is his weave of fact and conjuration (derived from a mix of tangential research), which makes the text threadbare in spots as it attempts to authoritatively explore the vista of Lee's family and upbringing, friendships, education, writing process and present life. And, oddly, Shields' book closes with a misplaced thematic defamation of Lee's carefully wrought novel.

Mockingbird has three sturdy chapters, though, that lend revealing biographical subtext. These chronicle the diligent shepherding of Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by her agent and editor; her lifelong friendship with the flamboyant Truman Capote; and her struggle to write a second novel. About this literary silence, Shields reports that Lee is self-forgiving: "People who have made peace with themselves are the people I most admire in the world."


Writers' night

The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein opens in June 1816, as a spooky summer storm rages around the Swiss villa of Lord Byron. Inside, five friends sit near a warm fire, writing ghost stories at the behest of their host. From the charged evening that gave birth both to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the first vampire novel, The Monsters segues into a superlative, riveting history of Shelley's idiosyncratic parentage (writers William Godwin and proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft), her love-starved childhood, and her erratic life with Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and their gifted contemporaries (including the "mad, bad and dangerous to know" Lord Byron).

With acute psychological insight, Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, historians and award-winning authors of the American Family Albums, explicate Mary's internal and external worlds, effectively connecting the turmoil of her 19th-century life to the poignant themes at the heart of Frankenstein. Though her family and friends experienced misfortune and untimely deaths after she published Frankenstein, The Monsters sensibly suggests that if malady fell upon them, it was because of their "monstrous" natures—ones that veered unwisely toward self-aggrandizement, incest and excess—all in a search for unconditional love.


Jungle fervor

Writer and master muckraker Upton Sinclair catapulted to fame with his exposé novel on the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, which instigated the Pure Food and Drug Act. This year, Sinclair's timely masterpiece turns 100, and Fulbright scholar Anthony Arthur gives us an excellent, balanced tribute to the author's life, literary achievements and still relevant social platform.

Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair is an absorbing chronology; Arthur knows his subject well and appreciates the oxymoron of Sinclair's austere personal habits and impassioned idealistic impulses. Chapters place Sinclair's life into distinct identities (progressing from "The Penniless Rat" to "The Sage") following the publishing career of an outspoken social reformer and tireless, disciplined novelist who was "the most conservative of revolutionaries." Arthur expertly contextualizes Sinclair's life amid the rambunctious 20th-century milieu: Sinclair found celebrity at 27, had a long (eventually aborted) association with the American Socialist Party, a run in the 1943 California gubernatorial race, a Pulitzer Prize for Dragon's Teeth (starring the inimitable Lanny Budd), and three marriages.


Alison Hood is a writer in San Rafael, California.

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