According to a new book out on May 2 from her longtime friend and confidante, Harper Lee called Truman Capote a "compulsive l[iar]" in her letters. Lee and Capote were friends and writing partners for years, and it's widely known that Lee based the To Kill a Mockingbird character Dill Harris on the In Cold Blood author. Lee's revelation about Capote's lying habit comes from a March 2006 letter to Wayne Flynt, one of many contained in Flynt's forthcoming Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee. 
 
 Both Lee and Capote achieved literary success in the mid-20th century. Following the sensational Clutter murders in 1959, the two writers traveled to Kansas so that Capote could cover the story for The New Yorker. Lee worked as Capote's "assistant researchist" in Kansas, and later edited his final draft of In Cold Blood. She also published her own article about the murders in the March 1960 issue of the FBI trade magazine Grapevine. But when he published In Cold Blood in 1966, Capote gave Lee no credit for her hard work. 
 
 Lee's letters to Flynt reveal a reason for Capote's snub. After writing that "Capote’s drinking and misery soured their friendship," according to The New York Times, Lee told Flynt: "I was his oldest friend, and I did something Truman could not forgive: I wrote a novel that sold . . . He nursed his envy for more than 20 years." 
 
 Read all about Truman Capote's "compulsive lying" and more when Mockingbird Songs comes out on May 2. ||||| Wayne Flynt was a close friend of Harper Lee until her death in 2016, one of the few she still granted visits after she entered a nursing home near the end of her life. Before that, Flynt, professor emeritus of history at Auburn University and author of numerous books on Alabama history, corresponded with Lee through letters since their initial meeting in 1983. 
 
 With a sure-to-be bestseller on the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" debuting Tuesday, author Wayne Flynt discussed Harper Lee in an exclusive interview with the New York Times. 
 
 Flynt's book, "Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship With Harper Lee" offers insight into the famously publicity shy Lee, including some confirmations of much-discussed topics such as her relationship with Truman Capote and if she would have approved of this book. 
 
 Release date set for Wayne Flynt's book on friendship with Harper Lee 
 
 Here are just a few of the things we learned from the in-depth interview: 
 
 1. Lee, known in her hometown of Monroeville by her given name of Nelle Harper Lee, only asked Flynt not to write about her while she was living. Flynt told the NYT he feels the book "allows her to speak beyond the grave and without any risk to her privacy." 
 
 2. One reason Lee shied away from the media and the glare of fame's spotlight was her fear of obsessive fans. She once had a stalker and was concerned with stalkers and assassination, Flynt told the NYT. 
 
 3. Truman Capote was a compulsive liar. Lee and Capote were childhood friends in Monroeville and he was the inspiration for the character Dill in "To Kill a Mockingbird." Lee's friendship with Capote eventually ended over jealousy. Lee wrote to Flynt: "I did something Truman could not forgive: I wrote a novel that sold." 
 
 Click here to read Flynt's Eulogy for Harper Lee: 'Atticus' Vision of Ourselves' 
 
 4. Lee was so nervous before interviews and speaking engagements that she would vomit. 
 
 5. Flynt admits Lee "may not have fully participated in the decision to publish a long forgotten and flawed first novel ('Go Set a Watchman')" because of her age and health issues. However, Flynt said that at the time, Lee welcomed its publication. 
 
 Click here to read the detailed interview in the New York Times. ||||| Chip Somodevilla/Getty Harper Lee, photographed here in 2007, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 
 
 While Monroeville, Ala., is Harper Lee's hometown, she made New York City her town by choice. 
 
 It was here she wrote the bulk of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and sweated through the many rewrites of what would become one of the most cherished novels of the 20th century in an airless, one-bedroom apartment in Yorkville. 
 
 What has been little spoken of until now is the crucial role a New York couple played in bringing the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Mockingbird" to the page. 
 
 In Mary McDonagh Murphy's documentary, "Hey Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird," opening Friday at the Quad Cinema, Joy and Michael Brown sit down before the cameras for a rare interview. They relate how they came to give Lee the gift of a year free to write without the need to earn a living. 
 
 It was Christmas Eve, 1956, when Lee showed up at the apartment of her dear friends with her own modest presents. She'd been working for several years as an airline reservations clerk in a midtown office. She couldn't get the time off to head home for the holidays, so she came to the Browns. 
 
 Lee wrote about the evening for McCall's magazine after "Mockingbird" was published in 1960, recalling how she found an envelope addressed to her in the branches of the Christmas tree. 
 
 "I opened it and read: 'You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.' 
 
 "'It's a fantastic gamble,' I murmured, 'a great risk.' 
 
 "My friend looked around his living room, at his boys half buried under a pile of Christmas wrapping paper. His eyes sparkled as they met his wife's and they exchanged a glance ... 
 
 "Then he looked at me and said softly: 'No, honey, it's not a risk. It's a sure thing.'" 
 
 After briefly stepping into the public eye, the Browns have become reticent again in the wake of a controversy over an as-yet-unpublished biography of Lee. Excitement spread when Penguin Press announced that "The Mockingbird Next Door" had been written by a former Chicago Tribune reporter with input from Lee. 
 
 Lee, who is now 85 and suffered a stroke in 2007, made a statement through her 99-year-old sister Alice's law firm that she had not "willingly participated" with author Marja Mills. Mills then produced a letter, one prepared by her and signed by Alice, vouching that both sisters had acted as "invaluable guides." The matter is unresolved. 
 
 Meanwhile, the Browns speak eloquently in the documentary as Michael, a Broadway lyricist who performed in supper clubs around town, explains that in 1949 he received a letter from his friend Truman Capote, "in tiny, little handwriting," saying a friend of his was coming to New York and "would you kindly look after her." 
 
 The friend was Capote's childhood soulmate, Nelle Harper Lee, who had quit the University of Alabama to become a writer. 
 
 Those first years in Manhattan were rough going, says Charles J. Shields, author of the biography "Mockingbird." But though she would walk down streets smacking parking meters to shake loose dimes and nickels, Lee had an exceptional social life. 
 
 "She sort of followed Truman around. He was a literary lion and gave her entree," according to Shields. "All she would say about herself at parties was that she was from Alabama and working on a book." 
 
 That she was, thanks to the Browns. Michael had received a lump-sum payment, and Joy, a former ballerina who had studied with George Balachine, immediately thought to give it to Nelle. 
 
 "I knew that if she could get her work seen that she'd have it," Michael recalls, adding later. "But I never, never foresaw anything like this. Like what happened." 
 
 Joy still sounds incredulous more than 50 years later. 
 
 "They published 5,000 copies for heaven's sake. Who was going to buy 5,000 copies of this book?" 
 
 In fact, that first printing of "Mockingbird" fell at least 30 million copies short of the eventual demand. 
 
 After Lee retreated from fame, sidestepping all public exposure, New York City offered the anonymity that allowed her to ride the subways and visit secondhand bookstores without having to answer what came to be a harrowing question: When was the second book coming? 
 
 As Anna Quindlen, who pays homage in "Hey Boo" along with other notables like Tom Brokaw and Oprah Winfrey, muses: "I don't know if she felt she couldn't do it, but I prefer to think she wouldn't do it." 
 
 Lee being Lee, what are the chances we'll ever find out?
– In the soon-to-be published contents of a decade-old letter, Harper Lee accused her "oldest friend," Truman Capote, of being an inveterate liar who destroyed their friendship with his jealousy. Wayne Flynt, an Alabama historian and longtime friend of Lee's in his own right, is publishing a book next week about his quarter-century relationship with the To Kill a Mockingbird author, the New York Times reports. According to AL.com, Flynt was one of a handful of people still allowed to visit Lee after she moved into a nursing home in the final years of her life. Flynt tells the Times that Lee, who removed herself from public life in the 1960s, only told him not to write about her while she was alive. Capote and Lee had been writing partners for years, and she even based a character in To Kill a Mockingbird on him, Bustle reports. But in a 2006 letter to Flynt, Lee said of Capote: "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.'" She also said that while their friendship was strained by Capote's drinking and "misery," it was ultimately ruined by jealousy. "I did something Truman could not forgive: I wrote a novel that sold," she wrote. "He nursed his envy for more than 20 years." To Kill a Mockingbird has sold more than 40 million copies. Flynt's Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship With Harper Lee will be released May 2.