This could be an especially maddening season for the 84-year-old author, given that 2010 marks the 50th year since To Kill a Mockingbird was published, and we all know how the media love anniversaries. Life can’t be easy when everything you hate about success stands between you and the Piggly Wiggly.

I sympathize with Lee, who has steadfastly refused to take part in the merchandising of her most famous accomplishment. The courthouse has long since been turned into a Mockingbird museum, to the delight of a constant stream of camera-toting tourists, foreign and domestic. The gift shop is in the venerable courthouse where as a child Lee watched her father practice law, and which she later rendered so vividly in her book. That would be a mere T-shirt’s toss from a gift shop peddling Mockingbird hats, tote bags, necklaces, Christmas ornaments, refrigerator magnets, wrist bands (inscribed “I see it, Scout, I see it!”) and paper fans.

6,372) that served as the model for her novel’s Maycomb, has found herself living a short drive from one restaurant called the Mockingbird Grill and another named Radley’s Fountain, after Boo Radley, the character in Mockingbird who might be voted Least Likely to Become a Restaurateur. Strongly inclined to put aside the hype and hoopla and let literature speak for itself, Lee, the best-known native of the town (pop. To spend an hour in Monroeville, Alabama, is to know why Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, ranks as one of the crankiest writers on the planet.

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