What Two Forgotten Pieces Tell Us About Harper Lee

Four days before Christmas in 1959, an employee in the records section of the Federal Bureau of Investigation wrote to one of J. Edgar Hoover’s top lieutenants to inform him of a “Call From [Redacted] of Random House.” The caller—almost certainly Bennett Cerf, the head of the publishing house—wanted to know if the Bureau could help one of his clients by sending a wire “identifying Truman Capote as a legitimate writer assigned to do a story.” The memo about that call has more blacked-out boxes than a crossword puzzle, but it conveys the lengths to which Random House went to assist Capote, who had left for Kansas without any press credentials after reading a sliver of an article in the New York Times about the Clutters, a family of four who had been murdered in their home.