Harper Lee famously authored only one book over the course of a half century — To Kill a Mockingbird's sequel, Go Set a Watchman, was published last year as some speculated how involved in the decision Lee had truly been. It would be unfair, however, to say To Kill a Mockingbird was Lee's sole work; in addition to helping her friend Truman Capote with In Cold Blood, Lee wrote a handful of nonfiction pieces — including her first published article, this little-known essay on love, from a 1961 issue of Vogue:
Few of us achieve compassion; to some of us romance is a word; in many of us the ability to feel affection has long since died; but all of us at one time or another — be it for an instant or for our lives — have departed from ourselves: we have loved something or someone. Love, then is a paradox: to have it, we must give it. Love is not an intransitive thing love is a direct action of mind and body.Without love, life is pointless and dangerous. Man is on his way to Venus, but he still hasn't learned to live with his wife. Man has succeeded in increasing his life span, yet he exterminates his brothers six million at a whack. Man now has the power to destroy himself and his planet: depend upon it, he will — should he cease to love.The most common barriers to love are greed, envy, pride, and four other drives formerly known as sins. There is one more just as dangerous: boredom. The mind that can find little excitement in life is a dying one; the mind that can not find something in the world that attracts it is dead, and the body housing it might as well be dead, for what are the uses of the five senses to a mind that takes no pleasure in them? [Vogue]
Lee never married or had children; indeed, her essay isn't just about romantic love. She was close with her father and sister, Alice Lee, whom Harper called her "Atticus in a skirt." Read Lee's essay in full here.
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