Where Have You Gone, Harper Lee

I am reading To Kill A Mockingbird presently because it has received so much press during this, its 50th anniversary. I read it last in high school, like so many others. I liked it then very much. Unlike so many of the novels we endured as students, Lee's lurid descriptions of life in small-town Alabama resonated with me.
Sophomore English was the setting for my TKAMB experience. It struck me how this book came along during a time of great inequality just prior to the spark that lit the powder keg of the equal rights movement. Yet, the clarity of message in this book is unparalleled. It is prescient in that it predicts the future while being steeped in the past.
Lee's characters are not merely archetypes rehashed to move the story along like in so many character driven stories. They are written so personally, with such honesty that it is hard to imagine they aren't based on real people. Pursuing this premise, I did some checking.
Lee grew up in Alabama, under circumstances not unlike Scout, the narrator. She was a scrappy little tomboy who would sooner fight than play dress up. Unlike Scout in the story, Lee's mother was not dead, but suffered from paranoid delusions and was mostly bedridden. She rarely left the house. Lee's father, Like Atticus was a lawyer and State Representative.
The characters are special to us, because they are special to Lee. She takes great pains to show the utter humanity of these people and we the reader ache with them and enthuse with them. We laugh when their simple lives are fresh and carefree, we cry under the weight of their extreme duress. We breathe slowly and deeply while our hearts pump sitting on the balcony of the courthouse, awaiting the verdict in the Tom Robinson trial, feeling the sweat on our brow in that hot, over-filled room bubbling with an air of expectation.
These characters are not light even at their lightest. They struggle daily to be on the side of right, not the side of easy. The do not let stuff go.
Of course, the verdict is no surprise to most people and even the twist ending has been made hackneyed by so many cheap imitations in the intervening year, but maybe a high school freshman or two might stumble across this blog and I don't want them to be able to pass the test without reading the book.
What is a surprise is the endurance of this book and I believe it is because the message is so clear and so undeniably right... nothing good comes from prejudging a man and locking him in a cage of social inequality.
As an adult, I still want to be Atticus. A man so unwavering in his beliefs that he is willing to take all manner of abuse to his person and his character. As an adult, I am still more like Bob Ewell who is too stupid, too beat down and too hate-filled to see the light of day.
Lee told this story through the eyes of a child and that is what makes it so fun to read. The prejudices we all have that are so natural to us are so foreign to her. She shines the light on the madness of it all by simply asking why.
What I want to know is what happens to Scout and Jem and Atticus?
For reasons known only to the intensely private and now elderly Harper Lee, she never wrote another novel. She shied away from the spotlight her whole life, remaining an enigma to the throngs of people who simply wanted more.
I don't know what happened to Miss Jean-Louise Finch and family, but sure would like to. Ms. Lee, it isn't too late. You have all the answers. Again I ask, where have you gone, Harper Lee?

PS. I hate it when people tell me I HAVE to read something. So, I will refrain from doing so. I will however, categorically state that if you haven't read this book at all, you are half a human and reading this book with save your soul. If you read it as an adolescent, read it again. It's different from this side of life. It's better. Trust me.