The critics, gossips, rumormongers, and conspiracy theorists just didn’t understand. There she was, a small town Southern girl who had one big book dwelling in her soul, To Kill a Mockingbird, and she wrote it, and it became one of the most powerful novels ever written about the good and the bad that had long lived side by side on the wrong side of the tracks in the wayward and prejudicial streets of Alabama.

Harper Lee had either the fortune or the misfortune of growing up with a shy, timid little boy in Monroeville, Alabama, by the name of Truman Capote.

He didn’t have a lot of friends.

He never quite fit in.

He was definitely not the kind of typical Southern boy who grew up gigging frogs down by the creek, shooting squirrels at the first light of day, gutting catfish, and drag racing beat up, broken down automobiles in the middle of the night.

Truman Capote was different. Even then, he had, as they said in polite circles of Southern society, odd mannerisms.

If there hadn’t been a Harper Lee, he would have had no friends at all.

She was the tomboy. It would not have bothered her to shoot a few squirrels and gig a few frogs and run barefoot down the dusty streets of a backwash Alabama town.

But Truman Capote? He was already a purveyor of gentility and sophistication, and he had no idea what either one of them meant. Capote just knew he had it. Harper Lee wasn’t interested in it.

Both, however, felt a sense of compassion and empathy for those who grew up around them. Neither side of the track was very promising. They recognized the fears and hardships of living a life that, from birth, was as good as it would ever be. Be born. Work hard. Live too poor. Die to young. Never leave. No place else to go. In those days, it was the cycle of life in small Southern towns.

For Truman Capote and Harper Lee, their literary ties would forever bind them. He based his character of Idabel in Other Voices, Other Rooms on his childhood friend. And after To Kill a Mockingbird was published, Capote proudly wrote: “Mr. and Mrs. Lee, Harper Lee’s mother and father, lived very near. Harper Lee was my best friend. Did you ever read her book, To Kill a Mockingbird? I’m a character in that book, which takes place in the same small town in Alabama where we lived. Her father was a lawyer, and she and I used to go to trials all the time as children. We went to the trials instead of going to the movies.”

Harper Lee had written a blockbuster, a classic. New York, book critics, and the reading public waited for another. It never came. Bad or good, it simply never came. Harper Lee, for whatever reason, never wrote again.

And that’s when the whispers began. That’s when the rumormongers stepped out from the shadows. That’s when the conspiracy theorists started working fast and furious and overtime.

Maybe Harper Lee didn’t really write To Kill a Mockingbird, they said. Maybe it was her story but the literary work of Truman Capote. It did, some agreed, possess some of his classic style of prose.

Harper Lee forever claimed the novel as her own. Truman Capote never said he wrote it.  Then again, he never said he didn’t. And so many began rushing to judgment, doing their best to give him credit for the book.

She was pushed aside. After all, she still lived in Monroeville, Alabama. Truman Capote belonged to the glitz, the glamour, the parties, the celebrity status, the bright lights of New York. In Monroeville, not even the streetlights were bright.

Truman Capote was famous. Harper Lee had a famous book, but she wasn’t. Nor did she care to be.

Truman Capote will always be remembered for his brilliant literary and journalistic approach to In Cold Blood. It was a chilling account of the murder of a Kansas family and the hanging of the two men who took their lives. In Cold Blood invented a whole new genre, the non-fiction novel. It consumed six years of Capote’s life and was painstakingly researched.

And here is what the critics, the conspiracy theorists, and the rumormongers never mentioned at the time. They went out of their way to praise the inordinate amount of crucial and critical research. They forgot to point out that it was Harper Lee who did most of the research.

She may or may not have been able to write To Kill A Mockingbird without Truman Capote. He would have never been able to write In Cold Blood without Harper Lee. He would have had the style but nothing to write.

And, alas, their friendship began to fade.

Truman Capote desperately wanted the Pulitzer Prize.

Harper Lee won one for To Kill a Mockingbird.

He genuinely thought he would receive one for In Cold Blood.

He didn’t.

And he cut ties with Monroeville, Alabama. He turned his back on Harper Lee. She wasn’t his enemy, maybe. It’s just that, in his mind, Harper Lee no longer existed. She lived but no longer in his world. Jealousy is a terrible poison to swallow.