Bury Me with My Typewriter: Harper Lee in this 1996 Letter

When Mark Mayfield was the executive editor of Southern Accents magazine in 1996, he wrote to Harper Lee on the off chance that she would write a guest essay. It was Mayfield’s Hail Mary attempt to try to land a published work from the reclusive “To Kill A Mockingbird” author.

The Birmingham Museum of Art was opening an exhibit on Southern photography; he knew Lee would be interested.

“I knew she wouldn’t go for any type of interview, but she might actually write,” Mayfield, now an editorial advisor at the University of Alabama’s student newspaper, told Patch after news of her death broke Friday.

So Mayfield sent a letter off to her P.O. box in Monroeville, Alabama, not expecting any sort of reply.

Mayfield had knocked on the door of her home six years earlier as a reporter for USA Today for a story about the 30-year anniversary of “Mockingbird.” Her sister, Alice, had answered the door and turned him away. He knew firsthand how stubborn Lee was with prying journalists.

• SEE ALSO: Harper Lee, ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ Author, Dead At 89

But when Mayfield checked his inbox at the magazine’s office a few weeks after sending his letter, there was a letter from one Harper Lee, with an answer to the offer to write a guest essay.

“I was thrilled,” he said. “As a journalist, she was so elusive in terms of never being interviewed since the early 60s at that time, so it was pretty fascinating.”

In the typewritten letter, Lee politely passed on the essay, pointing him to photographer Eudora Welty, who was “frail in body but still fierce of wit,” Lee wrote. (Welty, too, declined the request, citing an intense illness, Mayfield said.)

But the best part of the letter, according to Mayfield, was a two-sentence postscript at the bottom.

“When you are my age and are as arthritic you will make as many typing errors but nobody will know it because you will be using a 21st Century word processor,” she wrote.

“My Olivetti will be buried with me.”

The letter instantly became a prized possession.

“That’s the only letter I have that’s actually got a card backing on it and in a polyurethane cover and all that,” Mayfield said. “Most of my letters are just stuck in files.”

As an Alabama native who has practiced journalism for more than 30 years, Mayfield saw firsthand the impact Lee had on the state and beyond.

“It’s impossible to over-exaggerate her contributions to the state of Alabama,” he said. “It was enormous. She is the best known author to ever come out of Alabama, and there’s been some really good ones. Her book changed the world and is still changing the world.

“Alabama didn’t have a whole lot to brag about when the book was published in 1960,” he continued. “Alabama was still a segregated society then. It was really important not only for the literary world but really important for Alabama as a state to come to terms with that. She was a part, in some ways, of the civil rights movement. She would never have agreed with that, but I believe she was.”

Mayfield provided the letter to Patch. See it in full below.