Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Jennifer Crossley Howard for The New York Times in which she discusses a new book written by Wayne Flynt, Mockingbird Songs, in which he discusses his 25-year friendship with Harper Lee. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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He ended up as the eulogist at Harper Lee’s funeral last year, but the Alabama historian and author Wayne Flynt did not exactly get along with the novelist when they first met in 1983 in the small lake town of Eufaula, Ala.

He asked her to sign his copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.

“She said, ‘No, I only sign for children,’” Mr. Flynt said, laughing, in an interview here. “I thought, you are really discourteous. Essentially, you’re just like all the stuff I’ve read about you.”

But over the next 25 years, Mr. Flynt, 76, a professor emeritus of history at Auburn University, said he became close with the famously reclusive Ms. Lee, who would have turned 91 on Friday. His new book, Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship With Harper Lee, is based on their relationship, on his takeaways from visits to the nursing home where she lived in her last years and from letters she sent that give a full sense of a personality that was one of the great literary enigmas of the last half-century.

In one, from March 2006, she declared Truman Capote — her childhood friend and literary rival — a liar.

“I don’t know if you understood this about him,” she wrote, “but his compulsive lying was like this: if you said, ‘Did you know JFK was shot?’ He’d easily answer, ‘Yes, I was driving the car he was riding in.’”

Ms. Lee wrote that Mr. Capote’s drinking and misery soured their friendship. Jealousy ended it.

“I was his oldest friend, and I did something Truman could not forgive: I wrote a novel that sold,” she wrote. “He nursed his envy for more than 20 years.

The book, due out May 2, provides a rare glimpse behind the curtain that Ms. Lee drew around herself after the sudden success of To Kill a Mockingbird propelled her onto the public stage. The novel about racial injustice in the 1930s has sold more than 40 million copies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and created a firestorm of interest about her that ultimately drove Ms. Lee to retire from public life.

She stopped giving interviews in the 1960s and told Mr. Flynt that she typically vomited before speaking engagements — so much so that she came up with a little pep talk, “a mantra of great egotism,” to help alleviate the pressure.

It went, according to a letter from 2006: “I’m older than anybody here, I know more than anybody here, so why should I be so afraid of anybody here?”

“It works for about 15 minutes,” she confided.

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Jennifer Crossley Howard is a freelance writer at The New York Times.