lack of wealth the federal government should not continue to limit black women's choices. addressing the structures that cause inequality is a option we have yet to try to scale. there's nothing wrong with black people that they can't solve. >> to watch the rest, visit our website booktv.org. use the search box at the top of the page to search for andre perry or the title of this book, know your price. >> good evening and welcome to the 2020 virtual gaithersburg book festival. we are so happy to have you with us today. wish you could be here in person but we are still super excited to have you with us virtually. before we start, i ask you to

please do three things. first, like this video. second, comment below to let us know where you are watching from and third, if the subscriber button to get notification about our upcoming presentations. you're going to have questions, please write them in the chat section, most, if not all will be sent to the author and she will answer them at the end of the presentation. also, we encourage you to support today's featured author by purchasing her book, independent booksellers and festival partner. finally, a big thank you goes to the sponsors, david family foundation, and montgomery college. let's get started. tonight, we've got author casey cep to talk about her best-selling book, the last child of harper lee. she beautifully tells the true story of murder, revenge and

courtroom drama. beloved writer, she spent years telling this story. she brings the story to life from the shocking murders to court room, to the racial politics. she's a writer after graduating from harvard, she earned a master of philosophy at the university as a scholar. interviewing casey tonight is eugene meyer, an award-winning veteran journalist with a passion for history, varying lifestyles, travel, real estate and the chesapeake bay. widely published in several magazines, authored three books and was for many years, a reporter and editor at the washington post. in 2004, is garnered 15 awards for his book and more than 55 in the new york times. welcome to the program.

>> thank you for having us. >> it's good to see you virtually. >> thank you, i know we are going to have a great conversation. >> i love your book. i was fascinated by the research you did and how you put it all together and my first question, the mississippi and then the one who successfully defended him and defended the man who killed him. turning this into a book so my first question, how did the

story find you? >> that's a great question. i always love to talk about the origins of the book and to start off, it's true the book is on different lives, people who have genders and races who have one thing in common, which is how they met, the intersection of this time, but what i love about the book is it gave me the chance to see this. the acknowledgment of what's happening around the country and the ways they think about others and the privileges you and i have, for me, the book was an opportunity to do that, think

about the life of someone like harper lee and think about diversity discrimination, and for that reason, it may not surprise people she was the origin of all of this. we can talk about later, the first one she had ever written, i wanted to write about her and i found out about what she had undertaken in the 70s and 80s and because she had done so much research, a lot of writers have not looked into the case and decided not to write about. so this was a great story waiting to be told she herself would bring it forward in the 70s and 80s all the way to today. i was lucky went down and is

near the end so people who had never talked about before, friends and families who are willing to do that and everything came together and i mean the book, to very different lives. the differences, he was murdered and he's black, too. you mentioned the white lawyer and the lawyer had also had an interesting career in politics before settled in with this. got to write about politics and there is a lot at work and i found my way to this story. >> let me ask you, you wrote a lot about race and politics, the

racial history of aggregation and history, as opposed to inclusion, the civil rights law and 1963 version, all eastern counties were accepted from the law. as a statue, a confederate statue recently, how is growing up there affected your worldview and how has it informed your work in general and prepared you for the world like this? >> since we are digital, at the courthouse which is the circuit court here, as you mentioned, we are going to gather in george floyd's memory and racial

justice, right under the statute, it's still there. years ago, there's a controversy over honoring ever and there's no a beautiful statue and at the time, i shared these with peop people, the two statures together told the story and we should tell those, i hope one of the outcomes and it's taken down and whether it's to get there license, a lot of people have to look at the statue every time they enter and part of the justice system or not so i think a lot about where i grew up it is a beautiful part of the country and i grew up fishing and it's a wonderful place to live in a group on a farm, there's a reason when i went to alabama and spent a little bit

of time in harper lee's town, it felt a lot like where i had grown up. a generation i hope were a lot of us feel like we don't have to live like they did, we do not have to maintain statues and the ways of the future should be here now. i do think in general, the chance to talk about harper lee, you talk about her when you're in boston and it's a national problem in the country, it's not only in alabama so i think for me, i grew up in a religious household, i think a lot about the virtues and devices. thinking about the way harper

lee as a white person, wanted to tell the experience of black americans, a talk about the experience is black americans in the 20s and 30s to the 70s so i think for me, i try to approach it with humility and honesty about what i could understand what i couldn't and what had been well done in the past and not well done and more important, whose voices had already been heard and whose voices hadn't. i'm grateful for where i grew up and all the ways it's changing and there are plenty of signs around the community already in anticipation of black lives matter and equality for all and i think that's always part of the story. we might as well look back in our genealogy and find people we are proud of and make statues for them and tell their stories

more than the stories of the past. thank you for asking. there are people i was talking to, the eastern shore is beautiful but it's a complicated place. >> it is indeed. i was intrigued by the title of your book, "furious hours" which i found mysterious at first. later on in the book, i learned where it came from but could you explain how you chose it and the significance to the work of harper lee and writers in general. >> that's a great question. plenty of people read the book about the underside wondering why at the title. when you publish a book, so many people, a lot of folks like my publisher who helped with the color and the design and layout, they help with the titles and the reason my book has this

tile, i was worried people would wonder what the heck it was about. so there was a lot of work and i'm grateful someone said we need to tell what the book is about but if you've read the book you know "furious hours" is a phrase that comes from one of the public lectures harper lee gave and she is talking about the history and black lives, harper lee talked about the experiences some of the indigenous tribes who inhabited alabama before white sellers arrived. it refers to the last battle which was what caused the exodus from alabama. it was when soon to be president jackson led a brigade of army soldiers, it was a terrible slaughter and she's talking

about that history and what albanians know and what they don't know, i love that phrase and the last battle near where all of these murders are. she was in town working on this book. i liked that i could lift up that prehistory which i didn't talk about much in the book and the ongoing stories of violence and the ongoing site for ownership in this area because it is a long history, it doesn't just go back to slaves new talk about race relations, it talks about the interactions between introduces people so it's an echo and i love that it's her words because the book is about her and her gift as a writer, it's a beautiful phrase. i chose it for the title because it comes from her but also speaks to all characters.

liberal in the deep south and spent a lot of time arguing with his colleagues and with people about innovation. the middle part of the book, the story of her life was a lot of the typewriters, for the writers who have complicated stories when you try to make sense of the world but i'm open to suggestions.

>> you have any feelings on that? >> in that sense, it's not my experience as a writer and the characters were all hard to write about for different reasons but when it comes to harper lee, i thought she'd be the one i had the most in common with but she's a very different writer than i am and she suffered over her work and struggled and in order for her writing to be good, you have to think about it and work hard on it and just be miserable, but that's not my experience. i love my work, i do it mostly with joy and gratitude for getting paid to do it. a lot of people have harder jobs and they work harder and they don't get to do their passion so all kinds of things the way police treat black people so when i sit down to write it

mostly easy and fun and i feel lucky to get to do it. >> reporting or writing if you had to choose? >> i love both. when i get bored, it's time to start writing and what i work on requires talking to people who study so getting frustrated with the writing, you don't know enough and you have the opportunity to learn from other people so i like them both about the same. i'm glad both are part of my life. i do a lot of book reviews and they feel solitary and lonely and i love with reporting, you can pick up the phone and call somebody and think see what they think and talk to with them about their work that i do a little bit of both. >> you say in your book, nothing like it self and then a space between boarding and writing an abyss.

everyone shows harper lee, the story was destined to be a bestseller but no one could tell her how to write it. talk about the abyss between the reporting and writing. >> that's a fine question and it's true, harper we knew about this case after it happened and she went to town and did all the same work i did and she's a better writer than i am and why couldn't she write a book about it? it's simply true the things that happened in the world are chaotic and they do not necessarily have a narrative even though they happen day after day other than chronology, there is nothing that tells you who's right or who's wrong or which scenes are important make

sense of the world and we all keep a diary or sit down for dinner and talk about today, you have to making a plot out of this. the abyss she means, i think if you're going to try with beautiful sentences reshape a story that has reverberation, you can start to bring art and craft into it but even figuring out what happens in what order to tell him, that's the abyss. when harper we did all of this reporting and research, she had stacks of papers in her death certificate, the question of who was the main character? forward the scenes and who's the hero and villain and who should be room for? there's problem after problem she couldn't figure out how to solve. i do have a lot of sympathy and since the book came out, they

struggle with writers block and they had a successful book and figure out how to do it again. someone who wanted to write but couldn't figure out how to do it. they tell you the story of the life or what they want to write about you just think that's perfect, that's wonderful. i want to read that book and the question is, how to get it down on the page. what quotes to use and where to make the chapter break and i'm sympathetic to it all. it's a lot to decide and it is difficult and it can be done well or poorly so that what i think it was. the truth is, he read, he's got a fine illustration of the difference between the two, it's the version of the stories she wrote first and then you read

mockingbird and everything is a choice. you can choose chronology, the narration, you can choose which scenes happen and i'm of the mindset she did a better job in mockingbird than watchmen. they helped her make better choices in her first draft and you can go back to your first draft and realized yes, sometimes the abyss is really wide and hard to bridge. i think malcolm is right, it can be truly sad and it can be burdensome for some people. ... another two poet its love and they have a complicated and interesting friendship, but robert lewis and elizabeth bishop says she the casual muse who makes every day perfect.

then he says she leaves holes in her poets for ten years on end, spends ten years trying to figure out the right word for something and the poetry she wrote is beautiful but didn't produce very much of it and, i i think partly that's because of this high standard to go back to janet malcolm's word, this abyss between what you see and would like to communicate and how you do if the with an inperfecting material which is language. sympathetic and i just not devoce as cerebral so when i do it i think language is always imperfect and indiana quit -- inadequate but he have to muddy through. >> seem is leak she overwhelmed with her material. say what you have here is an embarrassment of riches. a nice way of saying --

>> yeah, well, she had an embare embare -- embarrassment of witches. the book did so well, mocking period was an accident jung best seller and she did not have to write for a living. she could live off her royalties and thump being that reinforced the difference function but her work she never had deadlines and never needed anything more than the royalty check from mockingbird and that's part of their story and the part that people who know anything but her live has intimated she was partly stymied by success. the material excels of mockingbird went she was exemption from the normal pressures of writing which is you have to produce to away money with your craft. >> you say that facts for her were in short supply when she tried to come to grips with the material, yet you were

successful in unearthing facts that seemed to have eluded her. how did you accomplish that? >> that's a charitable thing so say and i think it's not quite true because at the end of the day i had an advantage harper lee didn't which is i was willing to make hear character and she never would health it's common in true crime, one of the dominant mode of story telling about crime, the writer or the podcaster tells you all but their experience of trying to learn who did it and how or why some piece of justice was miss cared and they're a character the store. harper lee would never do that. she private and only believed in old fashioned journalism so she wanted to write this people who experienced the murder, part of the trials, the lawyers and law enforcement officers and never tell you what it was like to interview anymore or what she

thoughtful it was all embidded in the story and me book is about her life and what made hear writer and interested the case and what was hard for her so i would never casey complain how so and so wouldn't talk. told you that person was a difficult person for harper lee, and when i said it's hard to reconstruct the life of a black sharecropper because louis maxwell was a black sharecropper who became a preacher and was in later if you accused of this. i can tell you law hard for harper lee to understand nat and doesn't sound that self-pit using that me as a writer found difficult or i as a researcher to fine it difficult to find the same amount of newspaper coverage but the reverend i could find pout harper lee. so i got include her in things she was never going to do and never bring herself into the story, so that made it easier for me. >> you were able to write more but louis maxwell and his career

as a minister than she was able to. >> i was lucky. his military records turned up. this becomes a kind of show your worth moment and i'm happy to do it because it's not a story of triumph for me. it's a story of a triumph of a lot of archivists and librarians and the military helped me find some of this army records there were extended members of his family who shared things. digital newspapers archives of the time that harper lee didn't have so i could cast a wide net for any mention of the reverend maxwell and was able to bootstrap that. somebody who new something told me somebody else who did or someone who had this letter told me about someone wholes might have a letters and i built a superstructure for the reverend out of wpa archives, out of general histories of the counties so i couldn't tell you what his experience on a particular plantation was like, i could look at sharecropper

stories from at the era and from that place and time and start to bring it to life, and i think even there, i probably was a little bolder than she was. it's never speculation. it's always built from archives and history but every so often you see me start to put become from the love of the reverend, for instance, his military service. i could talk to historians of the army bases where he served and told you've segregated barracks and i think harper lee was conservative and wouldn't have told you anything more than what she had learned from direct interviews and direct evidence in this era, and that is why my box has so many biographical by sprues and when i quote los angeles ton hughes and what he

full-time to the segregation segregation in the arm and and you know it's from langston hues and an opinion piece re wrote but you have to bridge out and if yaw can't you have to tell readers what they may never know. >> i thought you were able to provide a lot of context, social context, the world in which he lived and also the whole geology of the area where you talked but the town need by the reservoir and the railroad and i thought that was helpful for the reader to see beyond the two-dim mentional stick figures you've write out. >> that is a kind of narration i borrow directly from harper lee. i love the begin offering mock can bird where scout and gem-talk us about what atty cuss and whatever is happened today had to do with what happened

yesterday and all the yesterdays before that and i think for me it was so obvious when i looked at -- this story, harper lee was bon in monroeville but the temperature takes peninsulas in a town called alexander city and when i go there it's a mill town and people who live in and work there if they don't work for the mill, they're parents did or grandparents did and it was a mill town mechanized by hydroelectric power and port of the story is-the-way watershed changed and mills mechanized by hydroelectric power. you can not talk about the money and affluence of the community or ongoing exploitation of black work notices worked the nine in the mills unless you explain how the profit structure word and what changed live and why there are up toes of this size. love history and i do think it's the way we make sense of the

world and i think to some extent harper leave agreed with that, part of what she is doing and marking birder is tellogy how people in make come relate to each other because of how their parents related to each other and who is allowed to change or evolve and who isn't, and who is in control of the way society works. so, that part i owe spirally to her, and the little bit we know about her work on -- she is was going to call her book the reverend and the little well know about the reverend, its about the history of the area. going to sit you down and tell you but the river and tell you about that early mights to alabama from the carolinas and poor irish people who moved there she was just as interested in history as i am. even if she hated she was in the book i like she would have had a soft spot for furious hours.

>> did you have to fight with her. >> over and over again, emfa this -- empathize and -- it i a biography written by a gay name james atlas and jeff dier and he was supposed to be writing a biography of lawrence and he wrote a whole book but how much he hated dh lawrence and hated biography and how hard it was to write and i loved that back, called out of sheer rage and i think that even if you are riting a biography of your grandparents at various points you're judgmental of the decisions they made or could have made or how hard they're making your life but notice writing their memoirs and harper lee is in there shows so ornery, why couldn't she have writtenmer of her life down or read a letter where they're furious there's an article about her and she says it's riddled with

errors but identity almighty what they are or she is furious at so and so but doesn't say why. so you're always trying make sense of someone's life and you wish thaw were they a different way. i lop harper lee's work and i wish there were a hundred more novels than mockingbird, and more than i judged already or felt any kind of anger towards her. i just felt sympathy and we were talking about her attitude towards writing. the truth is those attitudes were reinforced by pretty serious depression and a pretty serious at different points in her life drinking problem, and i have a world of sympathy for that and i think her life was very hard and not just because she made it that way, and i wish like a lot of people who are close to her that she had been available to get help, and this was a time when aa was really becoming a force for good in the

world, and talk therapy was becoming popular, and i wish that she had gotten help because i think it would have helped and i think that there was nothing going on in her life that other people haven't found a way through, and so mostly when i was working on the book i just felt a lot of sympathy for her life. post mockingbird especially. when she was young and full of ambition and even work thing reverend she was full of enthusiasm and energy and gregarious and people just delighted in her company because she was a wit and won -- and had an encyclopedic mind and i wish some could have ahead that life all the time and didn't collapse into this bad habits. wish things could have been easier for her. that's true of the reverend. that guy is -- alleged serial killer in the book and people think he wrecked the community

and wreaked havoc and committed insurance fraud but the reverend who was -- who received the medals for valorous service in world war 2, i wish when we came home to a.m. there was a good john for him and someone as gifted as he was as preaching could have had a full-time parish and done it for a living and this life would have gone differently. i have a lot of sympathy and there's more than enough of it to good around the story, and harper lee is at the top of the list. it's true of everybody necessary the book, too. i wish tom could haven't run for office in 1997 instead of 1967. here's a guy who was for immigration and wanted alabamans to pay their taxes with joy, and he ran on that platform, and he got run out of town for it, and his family was terrorized and threatened, and so i have a lot of sympathy for everybody in the book, including her.

>> you still love robert. leave is a recall. >> a complicated guy. look, tom and harper lee both. i think a couple of people have told me they were so surprised to read about harper lee's politics and at one point i say she's basically an uncivil temperature mon john but she dad not approve of the method of the freedom riders and people are shocked because of the clear moral cinderellas of the book, assume she was out marching with king or participated in the to bus boycott that was not here life and the complicated racial politics of watchman, and is someone who was antilynching but maybe not -- she was more manners minded and morally mind than people know and that's very

hard to make sense of. one thing she had in common with tom is they were progressive southerners but processsive by comparison and only if you compared them to wallace, not if you compared them to king. so i think that's probably much more shocking to people than her drinking or her depression, is the confusion and the ongoing tensions she felt about racial justice in this country and i think to her credit, she let her book do the talking for her, and her book changed a lot of people's minds in ways that maybe she wouldn't have been able to. so i think that's a complicated part of the become and when you ask me how i feel about harper lee, i think i expected to find she was secretly funding the marchs or privately corresponding with king and that is not who she was. in fact she was worried that the freedom rider were causing more trouble than they were doing good, and in fact when she lived in new york, i think part of the reason she same home to alabama

was really a retreat from the kind of forward march of history up there. so, i think she's a very complicate person, and the atticus of watchman who some people wish had been written by someone else and was a fraud is a more accurate reflection of her own struggle to make sense of the world and figure out race relations and figure out the way that civil society should work. >> you write that from a marketing standpoint, the willie maxwell case was not an ideal parable about race injustice. you'll in the book about a black serial killer wouldn't be expected from the author of "to kill a mockingbird." i if she would trying to get i pushed today from the publishers in new york she would get a disreception her to same? >> it's an interesting question for her specifically.

i voice -- my book was published telling the story she was interested the telling but tells it in a way that con frond major failures of policing in he south. major mis carriage of justice and scrutiny on the part of white allies and people involved in the civil rights movement or involved in democratic politics, and i think there's a real question -- anyone would have published anything she wanted to publish, but she would was told over and over again this is a controversial book from her, and that -- i income some ways thought about this, too, the strange thing about furious hours, the maxwell case, tells the story of two black men who everyone knew were guilty of murder but were not convicted. and that is a very distributingly not representative -- statistically not representative story but criminal justice in the south. i love to remind people that

there's another beautiful book about racial justice that came out of monroeville and it's just mercy and tells a much more statistically representative story but the fate of black men in our criminal justice system. they're much more likely to be convict of murders they did not commit than to be acquitted of murders they did, and so i think that is the sense in which the maxwell case is bless and complicated and people would not have wanted it to be the next story from the author of to kill a mockingbird and she was toll over and over again couldn't she tale a story about moral heroism, not moral complexity, and i think there's another aspect of that imbedded in the maxwell case which is that on the one hand the motive for these serial killings was insurance fraud. the reverend took out policies on people he was then accused of killing and profited a great deal from the policies, but i tried to remember every time i gave book talk to point out the

obvious. that is not representative of what was happening to black americans with the insurance industry much more common they were denied policies or price gouged into policies that could buy or the policies themselves were much less generous than the policies available to their white neighbors, and worse than that, when the went to collect on them they were often denied payments they were entitled to and here is the revved rend, one of the only black men who wins at this game, who profits from the industry, which is systematically putt -- his neigs and peers and colleague. not many black men were profiting off life insurance. he is one of the only ones who was and that's part of the ron the insurance companies were so furious and frustrate bid the process. he was a grieving witness to who would go before the civil juries and win judgment after judgment which was just not expected and

not common for the time, and again here's poor harper lee, tell thing one kind of story and it's mud yesterday by the whole systemic story behind it. so i -- it is an interesting case for her to have chosen. i think very straightforward reasons it was hard to tell and why it was not straightforward. >> put aside she's the author of "to kill a mockingbird" do you think the story would be marketable today? or is it too messy, too complicated. >> i wrote a book about it. >> about writing the book. i'm just tack us but the narrative of willie maxwell -- >> absolutely. to the great credit of publishers and final live publishers and movie producers and tv show executives, it is its own kind of discrimination to decide you will only tell

lauder to and simple stories 0 it bo black lives, and i think it's interesting -- right around this time i was finish the book i talked to a black writer who asked if he had gone to see black panther, the marvel comic movie and that question was but the idea that there should be black villains as well as black heroes. think she would have been fine. the real question is, did she want to and would she have wanted to in and i think we could -- in the best version of life arch gets to be as complicate at everyone else and that includes a story like this, and i love getting to interview robert burns, the edge i vigilant day and robert is aware that what he did is both villainous and heroic about what he did upset a lot of people and pleased a lot of others and that it was complicated.

he's willing to talk but it and willing to puzzle through it all but he also knows he can't pretend it never happened. and i think when we start to decide what kind of stories can or can't be told, we have to be very careful because it is its own kind of discrimination and it flattens the complexity of other people's lives, and the truth is the maxwell case doesn't just have a black serial killer. it has black victims and the reverend was accused of killing two wives, brother, nephew and stepdaughter and if you decide you couldn't tell his story you would never tell theirs and you would never talk about the way the police investigated those cases versus any other or the way that the justice system brought charges of murder in some cases but not others, and when you start to say something like just because there are statistically fewer black serial killers we think than white serial killers you decide whole swaths of life would not be

talked about. i think she would have been fine with the book and could have been well-done and i wish every day to get her version of the same case. >> i was going to ask you, her papers are sealed by her estate. think you get to look at a few papers and tom radny had a brief case and this was just a little snippet and if you could speculate what were in those sealed papers. >> yeah. that's it opened kind -- owned kind of rollercoaster, a lot of day is would look ennervous and they would say we found the reverend and we'll publish ill. if harper lee had published this version of the case no one would have read my version. i woke up nervous because i think high live of her as a writer. it was clear to me from my interviews she had aplaced all the materials she we need to

write. i had letters she said she was three-quarters of the way through and it seems plausible there is was a manuscript and i have the paragraph the book where i try to round up the expert opinions of friends and family and when she was working on this version of the events and on the far brian someone says she wrote the whole thing, he sister lou reese read it it and it was better than in cold blood and you have people who are close to her who said she was incredibly dysfunctional at thing time. a very dark time, very harsh story to tell and after doing all the reporting and research she could never finish it. those were the two extremes, she wrote it all and. the wrote it. you ask me today versus tomorrow, some days still think we might fine a manuscript and some days we won't. i think with some amount of certainty that archive probably

contains more draft pages and that's what you referred to. both that she made notes. incredibly scrupulous recorder and everyday day some would go home and type up notes who she interviewed or talked to and what hey said and her impressions and she would have kept those and that's the page of notes that tom radny had in a brief case that was returned to his estate by her estate. page of notes where she was interviewing the reverend's sister and every reap to believe, whatever she wrote in the book, whatever she captain, maybe she burn what she wrote or recycled, whatever shed did with the manuscript we have every reason to believe there would be notes and see all the interviews she did and all the people she talked to because i tried as best i could to do that about of the people she was able to interview had died by the time i

kale long including tom radney. she spent hours talking to him and the reverend's widow was alive. this reverend was accused of killing two wifes but there was a third woman who married him, and that woman was alive and well when harper lee was investigating the case. and so i would love to see those reporting notes, whenever there is of the manuscript page its would love to see the reporting note. >> did you make much use of obituaries. >> oh, yeah, thanks you threw me the softball. this is a critical moment for local journalism and papers are following left and right and i hope the become lovers think but subscribing to a local paper because i couldn't have written my book without a few of them. in alabama, and some is just a reporting they did to cover the event as they happened and some is the way they reported life. they didn't do it fairly or

justly but to the obituaries, if someone died i could see their nieces and nephews and dramatic them dope and interview them and piece together the life of one the jury foreman you could know what he did for a living because you could find his obituary and that gave context to the stories. was grateful for the papers andd i talked about archives the state archives in montgomery are phenomenal. and they would just let me read along in the he basement dead candidate of local newspaper coverage or scroll through microfilm of what birmingham news or the alabama journal had covered with this stuff, and i love it. you can't write a book like this without it and if you lose it, people who try to write books 70 years from now won't be able to do it. wont have the context or the historical record they need.

i think it's a moment, buy your books from your local book store, politics and prose or wherever you are and buy your books there and subscribe to a local paper because "the new york times" can't cover everything, and what "the new york times" covers sometimes depends to the ecosystem of smaller papers it's a tough time and tight time for people but you have to spend some of your money local and you have to just really supports the institutions because without them our world would be totally different. >> if i can borrow a question from "the new york times" book review section, what books are on your night table? >> that's a great question. i love to look at that when they do it. i'm working on two pieces for the the "the new yorker." one is about marlin robinson who has a new novel out and i'm

absolutely embarrassed by the rich moves night stand which is everything she has ever written. essay collection and the novels and another book is about the legacy of william faulkner and the other towering, looming stack is everything falkner wrote. so i'm really -- i'm a pig at the trough. i've just got a lot of good stuff i'm reading. nothing contemporary or new but people who are looking -- people who are look fog books to guide them through the moment there's a lot of phenomenal nonfiction throughout and i've been looking at a book by william stuckly eley, an academic at unc and wrote a book about hat tisberg and the lives of black and white citizens there, and so that is a book i reallied a hire and if you're looking for something that can take you through the

long history of how we have just badly treated black people in this country, that is a book i would recommend, and if not that, then there are a new collection coming out of toni morrison's essays, beautiful collection and just so much good contemporary writing about the moment we're in i hope people will take a look at. i would recommend faulkner and robinson, too but i'm sure those are probably people who people have already read. >> one final question. there is a book in your future? another book? >> oh, i hope so. i've got on idea about a ship wreck that i have been kind of loosely working on itch got busy with work but i'm hoping the next book is about a slightly more historical story, a ship wedge from the 17th century but it has a contemporary hook because somebody went and found it and then there was a big legal fight over who owned the

treasure. so, i'm hoping to put that book together and it will be a little bit like furious hours because it's partly about the spanish empire that built the ship and sent it the new world and partly about the miami worked in the mines recovering the silver and jules been sent back to spain and then the legal fight, a true crime story because there's huge fight over who owns it and the story of colonialism in peru and colombia might as well just be a story about theft. so that's what i'm hoping to put together but it will be a while. >> that's good. we'll look forward to that. thank you very much. >> sure. >> so, in the pest version of life, everyone gets to be a complicated as everyone else. that is a quote i love. that was excellent. you guys this was amazing. we have several questions but before we get to question is want to let everyone know that

casey's dedication to being here today brought her out to a local school where she could get adequate wi-fi and are you doing okay with your power right now? >> i'm going switch to a different laptop for the questions. give me one second i'm logging in there i'm switching them out for power. >> in problem if'll ask gene one in the meantime. when we talked in the beginning pout this fantastic book you had mentioned to me that it was more of a book in three parts. i was wondering if you could elaborate on what you think that. >> it's again we didn't really talk too much about structure and how you decide how to structure a buick but it was a natural flow. the first write but the reverend

and his alleged fraudulent claims, and the women who died on his -- he collected and the second section was this remarkable lawyer, tom radney, a white lawyer who represented the reverend and after the reverend was fatally shot by one of the survivors, represented the murderer, and he was acquitted. and then the third section is about harper lee, and her struggles to tell the story, and her own personal demons and i thought it was a very well put together, well thoughtout way to tell the story. >> basically for a first book, i would think it's pretty impressive. >> very impressive. very impressive, i. >> what are you working on? you have a lot under your belt. you have something new on the fire? >> well, i'm working on a number of magazine articles and i had a piece in the "new york times," a

couple weeks pooing about he hudson valley film destroy being shuttered during the pandemic. and that is a fascinate -- who knew there was a hudson valley film industry unless you were there but it's quite thriving and then all of a suddenned ended but they hope things will get back to where they were, at least nobody really knows to what extent. then i've been working on a memoir intermittently about 50 years in the newspaper business, but it's really not so much things i covered through my lens. the antiwar movement up to the 2000s. >> welcome back. >> thanks a lot. that was seamless. so thanks so much. to just give a shoutout to the public schools and public libraries because i'm not the only author in america who is getting by on public wi-fi and i

am on the eastern shores show not much in the way of broadband but i tell you, buy your books local and subscribe to your local paper. pay your local tacks with joy because a lot of these people make use of these resources and i'm grateful to do it here and thank you for your patience. hope the folks at home didn't mind the intermission. probably enjoyed hearing from gene more than me way. >> we have several questions here. so i'm going start. the first one from mary chapman, she says i'm enjoying your book tremendously. which of the the servings was the most interesting for you personally and which was the most difficult to produce. >> that's a great question. for a minute my heart stopped because mary you'll learn there's some chapmans in my book, and the chapmans -- the curious thing but harper lee,

she had a niece who lived in alexander city where this took place and the niece married a hotel so she chapmans owned the horseshoe bend motel and i thought you were a long lands chapman and were going to ask me some nitty-gritty but the city. feel like all three parts of the book were difficult for different reasons but also just tremendously interesting for different reasons, too, and i think that in some ways harper lee was the easiest person to research. a a world famous novelist and people had interviewed center had been some effort to plea serve her papers -- preserve her papered about little she pathologically private and it's not as straightforward, people can't stop talk beaut writer and i'm reading the marilyn robinson material because i'm working an profile of her and she's absolutely accommodating and generous and kind and people in her life have been willing to

share stories but in the case of harper lee, she policed what people said about her so much that there was this -- people who knew her wouldn't talk but her and the people who knew her best said the least so that was its open frustration over the years, and some cases its took mel three years to convince some family member to talk, but eventually convince them to share their stories. so she came around in that way and whatever resistance there was mostly fade but i'll tell you in the case of the reverend maxwell, obviously this is a story that for his family is very different than it is for anyone else in alexander city and anyone else in the state of alabama and in fact for a lot of people this was macabre entertainment and this was a titillating story they followed in the news and they never felt like it was real and of course for his family, five family members were murdered and some instances there was never a complete investigation and there was never any close sure about what happened, and understandably members of his family were less eager to talk about it.

and understandably for some of them just for archival reasons they had less access to story of this life than radny foam hey did but tom. when tom did something the local newspaper covered and if it when tom won some award in school his mother saved and they lived the same house so there was a continuous archive of his life and so for structure reason its wait as little harder to learn but the reverend than it was either of the other two characters, so i think there war highs and lows with each of them and some things that came more easily than others so it's great question. that's the kind of approach question but when you say did i enjoy one more than the other? i probably actually enjoyed getting to write about the reverend more because there's so much in the way of ambiguity and mystery that are just inescapable and you have no temptation to try to smooth them over or make them less complicated, so it is simply the

case that we will never know why he did the things he did. people interviewed him in lifetime and asked him but he as either dison or inarticulate in the case of base fix facts of if life things we will never know but editions he made and that wag challenging as a writer to come up against it and figure out ways to be hospital with reed e -- honest with readerred what that could ever know and jut sow lly just sort over revel never milts of other people. people are end leslie complex and he moment you think you understand them if you're lucky they remind you don't understand them at all, and so the reverend was a kind of constant reminder of humility but what georgeis can learn or we understand but something. that's probably true and he love -- grew up fishing and he grew up farming and that felt very familiar to me and all the ways or lives totally different and i would never understood -- the county is the most rural block in alabama and still today the most rural and driving

around and think about what it was like to grow up there, i got to set this kind of scene of remote and rural and bucolic child and it would as lot of fun to get to write about. >> desnice writes what would you like to find if you found her manuscript. >> the whole thing. i just want to know it all. i mean, i really did ogood-i requests worried at various points that god bless -- i thought in the event slot harper lee's book turns um they'll say this is a nice idea you head but harper lee was already doesn't it. so i was a lot more worried about it and at the time that what would she have gotten things right that i hadn't, would she have had more materials than i had. would she have just had more

psychological insight. she did -- she was born and raised there and as much also i said alabama reminded me of the eastern shore it is no knelt eastern shore, and parts of the state really -- it gave us the civil rights movement but places in bam that the movement bypassed and alexander city is one of them and race relations there were very different than in montgomery or birmingham and they're insight, life-long bammans would have -- alabamans would have and i would want to read eave word and i love the way the book open width the river because it is a buhle and mighty thing, and it's a fascinating geological story how we changed the natural world and we make sense of it and put it to use. but it's also just a case that harper leave had an eye for rivers and an eye for alabama, and an eye for red clay and dish would just love to read the way she described the river and the way she described the creek

indians so i probably be awfully interested the way she set the scene what her geography was. a couple of people who knew her, really insist told me she kept a diary, and i mentioned this in the book, and i just think the diary of harper lee would be a very strange and interesting thing because she was very closed off from her own emotions and had a hard time talking about her work and these kind of deep -- she loved to talk, loved to tell stories, loved to repeat jokes, and she could weave an afghan from yarns she knew but a was private but herself and i think a diary would be everybody bit as interesting as the reverend. the inner life of harper lee and the day-to-day experiences. i could piece that together from the letter its got but the diary would be another level of access to her. so this are the two most tan

lied little things i can tell you. he are carists feel and i've been told it's boxes and boxes and i can't wait until we all see what is in it. >> nancy has a two-part question. she was what would you think ghost set of watchman what never published during her lifetime and do you think she would have supported this decision to have it published? >> yes. that's great question. and i gave a kind of cursory history of "go set a watchman" and i'm grateful to have a chance to revisit it because it was my entry point into the live of harper lee, and a lot of her friends and family did not approve of the decision to publish, and were very concerned. the thing to know about harper lee's publication history it that book came out right after the death of her older sister who had been sort of her business manager and had really managed her affairs. that sister was a lawyer and from mockingbird forward, that

helped look after the publishing contracts and made decisions about different editions and adaptations and all sorts of things, the business of harper lee was run by her sister and when her sister died in the fall of 2015 is when a lot of these kind of surprising decisions started to health watch watchman was published. a broadway adaptation authorized and a lot of people were concerned because these were controversial but also lucrative decisions and so i think it's worth scrutinizing whether or not harp lee would have wanted "go set a watchman" published. i was purported she did and she was alive at the time that the contract was executed along with the contract for the broadway adaptation, so i think that there are people who still ongoingly have questions and concerns, even if it was strictly legal about her ability to consent and her mental health at that time and allegations of elder abuse and the state investigated them. and i think it's a worthy thing

to scrutinize. who benefited from that decision and who made it, and to the point of this questioner, whyed hadn't ben made at an earlier point. to play devil'sed a co cat some people say the portrait of her favor was to controversial, the death of her older sister checked and the tell the hick the world could learn but this other version of atticus and whatever was upsetting to heir family was less upsetting to her. that's one possibility. whether or not she wanted it published i still think that there could have been a better publication for the benefit of the world, and this book was marked as the singh quell to to kill a mockingbird that harper lee worked or for decade busy as proditory lease to world but that would a complete misrepresentation. he wait as draft she had done in 1957 and when it came and the worried wish i i it come into he world as slightly more academic project, one that had the

history of the letters between her and her editor and between her and her agent and that would have pointed out that no publishing house would publish it and she revialsed to till a mockingbird and there's a great book i'd love to recommend to folks who are interested, it's atticu us finch anxious biography and is would written by justin crisp -- and i'm shore politics politics and prose will sell toe you but joseph goes to look at the race relations at the time and this genteel version of the kkk and be pours over harper lee's father's editorial in the local paper and looks at a much more realistic portrayal of the everyday and systemic race sim that black people in alabama face. and again this category of person who would never a have

joined a lynch mob but didn't want. the schools integrated and i with go go set a watchman was na move that was punched out and everybody thought it was singh quell has been explained and an know tated and made a little more understandable and intelligible to the audience who found it. i think it's like the question of why did the refer richards do what he did. we may never know whether or not harper lee did want the book published but having published it i wish it had been done differently because there's so much more to learn when it's contextualized and not just punch out into the world without any history or even an introduction. i talked to some people who think that harper lee wrote that book in 2009, and that it took few years to get published and then came out and when you say she was in their late 20s in and living in new york and angry at her father and confused about integration and she wrote that

forecast 1957. that's why it's so angry and so muddled and that's why the book is frankly a lesser esthetic object than mockingbird. it's a great book and i hope if you read "go set a watchman --" but josephs book is a fine exposition and he wrote a biography of strom thurman and thought how complicated the story of race is in the country and how implicate many of us are who don't feel we're racists in a racist society. so i hope if you were interested in watchman you'll look at that because it makes the book far more interesting and it makes, i think -- makes us all little more patient for what everybodier lee was up to trying to make sense of and how much the world was changing for people like her self-so a great question and i think if you haven't read watchman it's absolutely interesting as an example of how editors work

magic because you look at watchman and then read mockingbird and just realize, how much she was gifted a good editor and what their collaboration produced because it's a much more beautiful book even if it is less politically caked a. >> another question. one of he unusual about the biking struck tour, what was your instraights for structuring the story this way. >> a great question. and i have learn to love structure. if we think back to -- jean was asking me bowled the abyss that janet malcolm brings up. you find a great story and canned figure out how to tell it. when i learned beat themaxwell indicate was yous hat willie maxwell was every entity as interesting as this lawyer two two of the them together were enter ever every bit as interesting as hearer lee and be world needed a book that put her

life into context of other alabamans, and in the context of other aspects, other classes, 0 races, other genders, and so clear to me it needed to be in three parts, and it might not be obvious to read it but also allowed me to work through the straight chronology of the story. the book opens in basically 1925 when the rev rep is born -- reverend is born and we're with him until he's gunned down in 1977 and then we're with his lawyer, and then once the trial concludes in 1977, we pick up with harper lee. so there are lot of tan generals and a lot of meandering and i should own up to the fact i wrote the book the way i talk which is in a wandering, overly patient sort of way, and i love a good tangent and i love a good story so i'm always trying to walk down every side street and go to end of every cul-de-sac before i come back.

so -- -- at the bottom of the structure is 1925 to 2016 when harper leave died. we go when the reference was born to when she died. felt like an obvious truck tour and i read a bunch of other books. if you're interested from n structure, john mcphee, a colleague of mine the new yorker about out 0 book called draft four, and john is obsess its with structure and that even has thieves illustrations of ornamental andee graphic and geo gee oat metric shapes how the traces a story and i love them for it and if you're interesting the to structure it's a book worth reading. in my case i looked at two books and one is devil in the white city which is eric larson riz book about a serial killer in chicago worlds fay and eric's book which is beautiful, just has a structure like mine but alternates between the serial

killer and fred rick olmstead the landscape designer and city planner. the same kind of structure but alternates and same thing for the other book i like which is lost city of z and he chooses to ping-pong between perspectives. set mine in three parts because they're not similar enough and i can't went to pretend that harper lee had everything in common with a black sharecropper. she obviously doesn't. this reverend has a very different experience of alabama than she did but david's book is about an amazon explorer who went missing and that's the kind of a plot and the b plot is david graham intrepid recorder who explores the same portion of the amazon rain forest look going story and goes between the two you're in the past and the future and you're learning about exploration and learning about literary and archival exploration today so those are two books i looked at a lot and very well-done and handle suspense well and handle crime

well because you don't want to go looking at bad model of sensationalism or disrespectful crime books and both case they're looking at suspense and violence in responsible and serious ways. so, i love those two and i i love john's book as well. i could talk about book is other admire all day but those or two i did look a lot at when i was working on this. >> excellent. casey, this is the last question. this is from melissa mcdonald. what would you think harper lee would say about your book? >> um, that is a fine question. i try above all else to be honest, so i'll be honest. i don't think she would like it -- rather i think she would like the first gird then she would have scolded me for thinking her story was worth reading and probably have been a little upset about anyone who tried to pry into their private life which is ultimate lay lot of what i'm doing in her

section. and i think that should would have admired -- it's a serious and historical book and doesn't take for grant the tway that histories acts on our lives today and i think she would have liked that and he was pretty fussy about fantastics and nonfiction and the difference between the two and chapter of misbook nat along about her discontent but in cold blood and objections to the choices capote made and the way he structured his back and represent what you do know with certainty or not and she would have admired by attempt to get to the bottom of it all including her life to not repeat rumor to not rely on gossip to be as skype louse also i could but i -- scrupulous as i could but she would have said i get it the reverend and lawyer but i couldn't abide someone writing about me. think maybe she would have liked the first two-thirds but i don't think she would have been happy about the last third.

so, it's a great question and it's one probably worth asking -- seriously, good scrutiny to apply to anything you read. how were the people represented in this feel about it because peel ask me that about harper lee and i tried to think about how would the reverend's family feel but the book and the radny's feel about the book because all too often we can think about pleasing the most powerful or the people who have the most recourse for expressing their discontent, but when you're reading coverage of these protests, think about how everybody involved feels, how do the authorities feel, how do the protesters feel, is it doing justice to everyone's perspective and i really did think sometimes kind of personally how would i feel if someone where are writing but my grandfather or my aunt, because you tell the truth but you don't lit hold you back from telling the truth but also want to be

fair and respectful and i think that in that sense i tried often to think about how everyone in the book would feel about it, and i just tell you, when i did the event in alex city i mentioned that robert burns came but the truth of the merit one of the rev rep residents daughters came and a bunch of the radney's came and jim earnhardt a reporter in book came and in case you didn't think that it was nonfiction, nene book who was still alive walked off the page and were sitting in room and looking at me spread answer questions and talk about it. i would like to think even if none of them were happy that they felt like i had tried to be fair to. the all. so it's great to ask about harper lee and i know she is probably the person who brings the most people to the story but i stand by the kind of democratic structure of the book which is these other people are just as interesting and have just as much to teach us about the world and i think that

biography rightfully look ted lives of famous and powerful people but i love the ways the genre goes beyond that. so it's a great question but i think everybody bit as important to think what would this old lawyer think of what she has done and would he think it was fair and even what would the serial killer would thick, was she fair or government it right or taken liberty or anything like that snow so thank you for asking that. >> thank you, casey. thank you, gene. this was extraordinary, great time. i enjoyed eave second of it and i think our viewer did as well. >> thank you for having me. >> thank you very much. >> i'd like to thank all of you for joining us the evening. we know you would love to have your own coach of the book. click the link in our description box. that will take you politics and prose where you can place your

order, food lovers joined is tomorrow for a fun, lively and informative interview but -- the book ingredient, the strength chemically what we put in u.s. and on us and sunday morning at 11:00 a.m. a live presentation by award winning and best selling young adult author tack can about her new book, prairie lotus. please feel free to look around the youtube channel to discover all the other amazing programs have coming your way. he that's it, folks. thank you for being here. i'm your hess, have a terrific friday evening and we'll see you tomorrow night. keep reading. >> binge watch boost boyfriend this summer. saturday evening at 8:00 a.m. eastern, set until and and watch several hours of your favorite authors. next saturday, we're featuring commentator, awe senator offender of national review, william f. buckley, author over over 50 books, including up from

liberalism, flying high, and the reagan i knew. and watch saturday july 18th july 18th as we feature journalist and author malcolm gladwell, binge watch booktv all summer on c-span2. >> here's a look at some books -- published this week. larry ty recount the life of senator you're mccarthy in demagogue. tivety cross argues that black voters visittal to american democracy. and julie kelly offer her opinions then never trump movement in disloyal opposition. also about published this week in the end of white politics, msnb political analyst examines the success and failures of the liberal patrol ticks. ajbowl provide tuesday host of the 1948 election and its importance for america's political course in dewy defeats

truman. the 21 biggest lies about donald trump and in lead them eat tweets, an argument that conservatives make populist claims while actually ben feeting the elite. find these titheses this coming week. ... >> my name is ike pulver and i'm incredibly pleased to be hosting the book festival event. i would rather be doing so in person at a different time but i'mhr