Charles J. Shields
Charles J. Shields, author of Mockingbird:
A Portrait of Harper Lee, was named our featured
author this month for his nonfiction story "Doing
in the Great Pasha."
F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts
in American lives. Charles J. Shields discovered this isn't true;
however, Act I may be so interminably long that you die before the
second act.
After 20 years of teaching, Shields left the profession as English
department chair at a high school of 2,800 in suburban Chicago.
On his final day in the building, another teacher trotted after
him tremulously repeating, "But what will you do?" as
if Shields had announced he was going to open a fried clam shack
in the Antarctic. "I'm going to write," answered our hero.
And write he did, though the literary world did not welcome him
right off as he had expected. In fact, it didn't seem to notice
that he had arrived on the premises. For several years, he wrote
anything that paid: biographical profiles of young adult writers
for encyclopedias; test prep booklets; articles for career magazines‹
not the sort of thing the Pulitzer committee was hungering to read.
But Shields persevered, and finally stumbled upon his métier
(where he had left it under the bed), which was writing 20,000-word
histories and biographies for young people. The work was steady
and respectable, and so Shields labored at this for five years,
eventually writing 20 books of this sort (he likes the figure "20":
20 years of teaching; 20,000 words; 20 books. There's something
so Reese Witherspoonish about the number.)
But then a thought hit him in the back of the head like a well
aimed slush ball on a March day in Chicago. "Evita!" he
realized. "I should try my hand at writing a biography for
adults. That's where the big money is."
However, being the naïve, 50-something lad he was, he didn't
stop to think that it would take years to research a full-scale
biography. Nor did he pause to consider all the difficulties when
he chose to write a biography of Harper Lee, the author of To
Kill a Mockingbird who A) didn't want a biography written about
her, and B) hadn't granted an interview in 45 years.
Ha! Who cares? Shields chose to write about Miss Lee anyway, and
the next four years whisked by... Well, they passed incredibly painfully
and slowly actually. But at length, and after four rewrites, the
big fat 110,000-word biography was finished with 700 footnotes to
boot and as of this writing his book has been on the New York
Times bestseller list for over a month.
So there. The end.
~
Purchase Mockingbird:
A Portrait of Harper Lee at Amazon.com.
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