NELLE HARPER LEE

Biography

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of four children of Frances Cunningham (née Finch) and Amasa Coleman Lee. Her parents chose her middle name, Harper, to honor pediatrician Dr. William W. Harper, of Selma, who had saved the life of her sister Louise. Her first name, Nelle, was her grandmother's name spelled backwards and the name she used, whereas Harper Lee was primarily her pen name. Lee's mother was a homemaker; her father was a former newspaper editor, businessman, and lawyer, who also served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1926 to 1938. Through her father, she was related to Confederate General Robert E. Lee and a member of the prominent Lee family. Before A. C. Lee became a title lawyer, he once defended two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Both clients, a father and son, were hanged.

Lee's three siblings were Alice Finch Lee(1911–2014), Louise Lee Conner (1916–2009), and Edwin Lee (1920–1951). Although Nelle remained in contact with her significantly older sisters throughout their lives, only her brother was close enough in age to play with, though she bonded with Truman Capote (1924–1984), who visited family in Monroeville during the summers from 1928 until 1934.[18]

While enrolled at Monroe County High School, Lee developed an interest in English literature, in part through her teacher Gladys Watson, who became her mentor. After graduating high school in 1944, like her eldest sister Alice Finch Lee, Nelle attended the then all-female Huntingdon Collegein Montgomeryfor a year, then transferred to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she studied law for several years. Nelle also wrote for the university newspaper (The Crimson White) and a humour magazine (Rammer Jammer), but to her father's great disappointment, she left one semester short of completing the credit hours for a degree. In the summer of 1948, Lee attended a summer school program, "European Civilisation in the Twentieth Century", at Oxford Universityin England, financed by her father, who hoped in vain, as it turned out that the experience would make her more interested in her legal studies in Tuscaloosa.

Nelle Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016) was an American novelist whose 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of modern American literature. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966). Her second and final novel, Go Set a Watchman, was an earlier draft of Mockingbird, set at a later date, that was published in July 2015 as a sequel. A collection of her short stories and essays, The Land of Sweet Forever, is set to be published on October 21, 2025.

The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbirdare loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbors in Monroeville, Alabama, as well as a childhood event that occurred near her hometown in 1936. The novel deals with racist attitudes and the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s as depicted through the eyes of two children. Lee received numerous accolades and honorary degrees, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007, which was awarded for her contribution to literature.

In the spring of 1957, a 31-year-old Lee delivered the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman to Crain to send out to publishers, including the now-defunct J. B. Lippincott Company, which eventually bought it. At Lippincott, the novel fell into the hands of Tay Hohoff. Hohoff was impressed. The spark of the true writer flashed in every line, she would later recount in a corporate history of Lippincott. But as Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. It was, as she described it, "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel". 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.

Like many unpublished authors, Lee was unsure of her talents. "I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told," Lee said in a statement in 2015 about the evolution from Watchman to Mockingbird. Hohoff later described the process in Lippincott's corporate history: "After a couple of false starts, the story-line, interplay of characters, and fall of emphasis grew clearer, and with each revision there were many minor changes as the story grew in strength and in her own vision of it the true stature of the novel became evident." (In 1978, Lippincott was acquired by Harper & Row, which became HarperCollins which published Watchmanin 2015.) Hohoff described the give and take between author and editor: "When she disagreed with a suggestion, we talked it out, sometimes for hours" ... "And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of country."

One winter night, as Charles J. Shieldsrecounts in Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, Lee threw her manuscript out her window and into the snow, before calling Hohoff in tears. Shields recollected that "Tay told her to march outside immediately and pick up the pages".

When the novel was finally ready, the author opted to use the name "Harper Lee" rather than risk having her first name Nelle be misidentified as "Nellie".

Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbirdwas an immediate bestseller and won great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It remains a bestseller, with more than 40 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll by the Library Journal..