Background

Nelle Harper Lee, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch, was born on April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, United States. Her mother was a homemaker; her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, practiced law and served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1926 to 1938.

Education

Lee was educated at Monroe County High School, developing an interest in English literature during that time. Graduating in 1944, she attended the Huntingdon College in Montgomery for a year, and then transferred to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. There Lee studied law from 1945 to 1949 and wrote for the university newspaper, but did not complete a degree. In the summer of 1948, Lee attended a summer school in European civilization at Oxford University in England, as an exchange student. Soon after returning from Oxford, Lee realized her career was in writing and not law.

On May 21, 2006, she accepted an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame.

Career

Lee began her career as an airline reservation agent in New York City, where she had moved in 1949. In her spare time she wrote several long stories and in November 1956 she found an agent.

In the spring of 1957, Lee delivered the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman to her agent to send out to publishers. The novel fell into the hands of Tay Hohoff, an American literary editor with the publishing firm J. B. Lippincott & Co. During the next couple of years, she led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled To Kill a Mockingbird. Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate bestseller and won great critical acclaim. In 1962 the book was adapted into a film by the same name that featured Gregory Peck as the main character 'Atticus Finch'.

While in New York, Lee was reunited with Truman Capote, her childhood friend who had also turned into a writer. Lee assisted Capote in writing an article about the murder of four members of a family for The New Yorker. The article later evolved in Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood.

After the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird until her death in 2016, Lee wrote only a few short essays, including "Romance and High Adventure" (1983), devoted to Alabama history. Her follow-up novel, The Long Goodbye, was left unfinished, as well as a book about an Alabama serial murderer. Go Set a Watchman, written before To Kill a Mockingbird but essentially a sequel featuring Scout as a grown woman who returns to her childhood home in Alabama to visit her father, was released in 2015.

Achievements

• In 1961 Harper Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for her widely known novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and became a memorable film in 1962. The film received eight Academy Awards nominations and won three, including Best Actor (Peck), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Art Direction. It was filmed again in 1997.
  
  In 2007 Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to literature. In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded Lee the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given by the United States government for "outstanding contributions to the excellence, growth, support and availability of the arts".

Works

More photos

• book

  • To Kill a Mockingbird

    (Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor a...)

    1960
  • Go Set a Watchman

    (Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a ful...)

    2015

Views

Quotations: "I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected."

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."

"People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for."

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

"Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts."

"I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks."

"They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."

"Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."

Membership

In January 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Lee to the National Council on the Arts. In 2007 she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Letters , United States

  2007 - 2016

Personality

Harper Lee was known as a "modest, easygoing" writer who possessed "delightful, down-to-earth humor." Even becoming famous and rich enough, Lee had a modest apartment in New York City, and got around by bus while in town. When she returned to her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama (traveling by train), Lee lived in a one-story ranch house with her sister Alice. Clothes shopping there was usually done at Walmart or a Vanity Fair outlet; Lee traveled to the laundromat in the next town when she needed something clean to wear.

Harper Lee's interests apart from writing were politicians, cats, and travelling.

Interests

• cats, travelling

Connections

Ms. Lee never married or had children.

Father:

Amasa Coleman Lee

Amasa Coleman Lee (July, 19, 1880 – April 15, 1962) moved to Monroeville, Alabama in the 1890s. He was at first a bookkeeper. In 1915 he was admitted to the bar and began to practice law, primarily in Monroe County. From 1927 to 1939 he was a member of the Alabama State House of Representatives. Lee was also the editor of the Monroe Journal from 1929 to 1947.

Mother:

Frances Cunningham Finch

Sister:

Alice Finch Lee

(1911–2014)

Sister:

Louise Lee Conner

(1916–2009)

Brother:

Edwin Coleman Lee

Edwin Coleman Lee (1920–1951, cerebral hemorrhage) was a United States Air Force Officer.

Friend:

Truman Capote

References

• I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee Anyone who has enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird or Go Set a Watchman will appreciate this glimpse into the life of its fascinating author, which includes photographs of Harper Lee, her family, and the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird starring Gregory Peck.
  2008
• Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee In this in-depth biography, first published in 2006, Charles J. Shields finally brings to life the woman who gave us two of American literature's most unforgettable characters, Atticus Finch and his daughter Scout.
  2006
• The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee The Mockingbird Next Door is the story of Mills’s friendship with the Lee sisters. It is a testament to the great intelligence, sharp wit, and tremendous storytelling power of these two women, especially that of Nelle.
  2014
• Harper Lee (Up Close) Kerry Madden conducted extensive research for this Up Close biography, which reveals Lee to be a down-to-earth Southern woman who prefers to live simply, like her neighbors do, despite the fact that she is a treasured literary legend.
  2009
• Harper Lee: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author This biography examines the life of Harper Lee using easy-to-read, compelling text.
  2015
• To Kill a Mockingbird Told through the eyes of Scout, a feisty six-year-old tomboy, To Kill A Mockingbird carries us on an odyssey through the fires of prejudice and injustice in 1932 Alabama.
  1962