#casey cep

[theblackestofsuns]

Angelica Alzona’s illustration of Charles Portis for Casey Cep’s piece on the new Library of America collection in this week’s New Yorker magazine.

[ekute-ile]

Book 25, 2022: ' Furious Hours. Murder, Fraud and The Last Trial of Harper Lee.

Reverend Maxwell. Tom Radney. Harper Lee.

Alabama. Unresolved murders. Trials. Claims. Injustice. Justice. Courtrooms. Writings. Deep south. Racial politics. Writers block. Family. Fame.

Weltanschauung.

[nevinslibrary]

Totally Random Non-Fiction Tuesday

So, I picked this book up because according to one blurb I read, Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird, who was actually at the trial of the man who killed Willie Maxwell, a preacher who was accused of murdering five of his family, and court-wise got away with it.

This book tells the story of both the Reverend Willie Maxwell and his accused of crimes, the fact that both he and the man that murdered him both got away with their murders in court (and with the same attorney for both men, bonkers), and the book that Harper Lee wanted to write about the story called ‘The Reverend’.

It’s just sort of… it blew my mind a little. The levels of True Crime and such that are in this book. It’s like a rubix cube of stories that have been put together by the author, Cep. Such an interesting read.

You may like this book If you Liked: Mockingbird by Charles J. Shields, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, or Rising Road by Sharon L. Davies

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep

[desescrita]

“Apart from inaccuracy, one of the greatest flaws in any historical account is a sense of inevitability. That impression arises only when dissent has been so flattened, arguments so distorted, and the past so tamed that it fits sedately into the terms of the present. The idea that women were always going to get the right to vote in the United States ignores the reality that they only got that right in Switzerland in 1971 and in Saudi Arabia in 2015. It also fails to explain why the right was granted to American women in 1920, as opposed to 1919 or 1918, or, perhaps more pointedly, 1776. Worse, the feeling of inevitability also conveys a sense of irreversibility, as if history always advances, and never stalls, or regresses.”

— Casey Cep, The Imperfect, Unfinished Work of Women’s Suffrage

[luxe-pauvre]

Apart from inaccuracy, one of the greatest flaws in any historical account is a sense of inevitability. That impression arises only when dissent has been so flattened, arguments so distorted, and the past so tamed that it fits sedately into the terms of the present. The idea that women were always going to get the right to vote in the United States ignores the reality that they only got that right in Switzerland in 1971 and in Saudi Arabia in 2015. It also fails to explain why the right was granted to American women in 1920, as opposed to 1919 or 1918, or, perhaps more pointedly, 1776. Worse, the feeling of inevitability also conveys a sense of irreversibility, as if history always advances, and never stalls, or regresses.

Casey Cep, The Imperfect, Unfinished Work of Women’s Suffrage

[dr-archeville]

The Harper Lee We Never Knew, Revealed in "Furious Hours"

Journalist Casey Cep's fascinating book picks up a true-crime story that the "To Kill a Mockingbird" author left unfinished, upending cliches about her in the process.

In the late 1970s, Harper Lee’s neighbors reported hearing her typewriter at all hours.  She’d recently finished a nine-month stay in rural Alabama, where she was reporting on a string of grisly murders, and it seemed possible that, years after To Kill a Mockingbird, the beloved writer would publish once again.

She never finished that book, though.  She dropped the project, entitled The Reverend, after a decade of work.  Save for Go Set a Watchmen — a novel drafted half-a-century before it was published in 2015, and clouded by considerable questions about authorial agency — Lee remained largely absent from public life.

This was the murky territory that the journalist Casey Cep entered when she decided to pick up the threads of the case that Lee had left behind.  “Unfinishedness,” Cep writes in her new book about both Lee and the case, “is an emotional category as much as a chronological and aesthetic one.”

Several complex stories lie at the heart of Cep’s Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, which Cep handles by dividing the book into three parts; the first two of which deal with the crime that Lee was reporting on for The Reverend.  Part one is about Willie Maxwell, a black minister in Alabama in the 1970s, who was accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money.  (Although a jury was never able to indict him, he was shot by a vigilante at the funeral of his stepdaughter.)  Part two takes up the story of Tom Radney, an Atticus Finch-like figure who defended both Maxwell and the vigilante.  And part three treats Lee as a character, exploring both the demons that stymied her writing and the side of her that we’re less familiar with — the lively, obsessive reporter who contributed massive (and largely unrecognized) research to her friend Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood.

Furious Hours, a work braced equally by lyricism and meticulous research, doesn’t attempt to solve the Maxwell case, but over the course of 275 pages, it deftly touches on race, crime, journalism, and what it means to try to tell the truth.  Cep has two upcoming readings in the Triangle, one at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh (where she briefly spent time doing parish work) on August 12 and another at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill on August 15.  The INDY caught up with her by phone as she was coming in from gardening at her home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Click link for interview.

Casey Cep Monday, Aug. 12, 7 p.m., free Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh Thursday, Aug. 15, 7 p.m., free Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill

[wellesleybooks]

SUMMER READING SUGGESTIONS

Love Harper Lee? Author Casey Cep’s well researched book FURIOUS HOURS is a fascinating combination of true crime, Southern courtroom drama and an neat overview of Lee’s life. You may want to read IN COLD BLOOD and Harper Lee’s novels afterward for total immersion.

[theblackestofsuns]

Seth’s illustration of William Faulkner for Casey Cep’s review of Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words in this week’s New Yorker magazine.