Christmas Tales of Alabama Read Online Free

wrote, producing a manuscript about the wrongful prosecution of a black man that, though still rough, caught the attention of an editor at J.B. Lippincott. It included a setting based on her hometown of Monroeville and characters based on family, friends and neighbors. Truman Capote was cast as the young boy, Dill, a friend of the main character, a tomboyish girl named Scout Finch.
    After several turns at editing, the book was finally ready. To Kill a Mockingbird would be published in 1960, and Nelle Harper Lee’s life would never be the same.
    The wild success of the book, a subsequent Pulitzer Prize and the 1962 film starring Gregory Peck overwhelmed Lee, who began refusing interviews and wrote only the 1961 essay for McCall’s as a love letter to the Browns and a few other articles. To Kill a Mockingbird would be her only novel—but what a novel.
    Its impact was felt worldwide and especially in Lee’s South, where racial tensions were building in the 1960s. The New Yorker called the book “totally ingenious,” and a Time magazine reviewer wrote that the book taught the reader “an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life.”
    It is now purported to be the most widely read book in the world, after the Bible.
    Would the world have had the gift of To Kill a Mockingbird if not for a thoughtful and generous present to a friend from Michael and Joy Brown? Perhaps not. Though Lee had been writing since arriving in New York, she had yet to find success in publishing, and without that year to focus, who knows if her talent would have been tapped?
    Michael Brown’s successes continued. He created the World of Chemistry , a show that combined live actors interacting with those on film in a genre that became known as an “industrial musical,” for Dupont to present at the New York World’s Fair. It was seen by more than five million people. Brown would later write another musical for Woolworth’s.
    Brown’s children’s book series about Santa Mouse has sold more than three million copies and is listed by Publishers Weekly as one of best-selling children’s series of all time. Joy Williams Brown was the artistic director of the Margot Fonteyn Academy of Ballet and formerly a principal dancer for Roland Petit in Les Ballets de Paris, and in the 1970s, she was the American member of the Royal Academy of Dance.
    The Browns eventually had three sons, and they continue to live in New York.
    T RUMAN C APOTE ’ S S OUTHERN C HRISTMAS
    Many people remember Truman Capote as the pale-faced little man whose high, nasal voice was oft-imitated—and not in a flattering manner. In his foray into acting in his later years, Capote played a caricature of himself in the film Murder by Death .
    Those who had known him from childhood knew that Truman Capote, the brilliant writer with the glamorous lifestyle, was more than a caricature. Abandoned by his parents and bullied as a child, Truman developed a cloak of confidence and self-importance that he would wear like armor against pain the rest of his life.
    In the South, we embrace our eccentrics: the strange aunts, the oddball cousins, the small-town resident who comes out only at night. Though Truman may eventually have felt abandoned by the high-society friends whose secrets he revealed in his stories, and while he often alienated those who chose to love him, he was a true son of the South. He could never extricate himself from those tangled roots.
    The South—and his memory of it—was a constant among the many shifting currents in the turbulent life of the boy who was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans on September 30, 1924. Some believe Truman’s stories that are set in the South are among his finest works. The characters, based on members of his unusual and dysfunctional family, leap from the pages in all their flawed glory, leaving the reader wondering how such simple