Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee (born April 28, 1926) is an American novelist, best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

Born in Monroeville, Alabama, Lee is the youngest of the four children of father Amasa Coleman Lee and mother Frances Finch Lee.

After graduating from high school in Monroeville, she attended the female Huntingdon College in Montgomery for only a year before transferring to law school at the University of Alabama in 1945, where she was a member of the Chi Omega sorority. While there, she wrote for several student publications and spent a year as editor of the campus humor magazine, Rammer-Jammer. Though she did not complete the requirements for a law degree, she pursued studies for a summer in Oxford, England, before moving to New York in 1950, where she worked as a reservation clerk with BOAC.

Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. The following month, at the East 50th townhouse of her friends Michael Brown and Joy Williams Brown, she received a gift with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." Within a year, she had a first draft. Working closely with J.B. Lippincott editor Tay Hohoff, she completed To Kill a Mockingbird in the summer of 1959. Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate bestseller and won her great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It remains a bestseller today and has earned a secure place in the canon of American literature. In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll conducted by the Library Journal.

Many details of To Kill a Mockingbird are apparently autobiographical. Like Lee, the tomboy Scout is the daughter of a respected small town Alabama attorney. The plot involves a legal case, the workings of which would have been familiar to Lee, who studied law. Scout's friend Dill is commonly supposed to have been inspired by Lee's childhood friend and neighbor, Truman Capote - while Lee is the model for a character in Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Since the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee has granted almost no requests for interviews or public appearances, and with the exception of a few short essays, has published no further writings. She did work on a second novel for years, eventually filing it away unpublished. During the mid-1980s, she began writing a book of nonfiction about an Alabama serial murderer, but she put it aside when she was not satisfied with the result.

Harper Lee’s cousin, Richard Williams, has asked the reclusive author when she’s going to come out with another book. “And she said, ‘Richard, when you’re at the top, there’s only one way to go”.

Lee said of the 1962 Academy Award–winning screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird by Horton Foote: "If the integrity of a film adaptation can be measured by the degree to which the novelist's intent is preserved, Mr. Foote's screenplay should be studied as a classic."

When Lee attended the 1983 Alabama History and Heritage Festival in Eufaula, Alabama, she presented the essay "Romance and High Adventure".

Lee has been known to split time between an apartment in New York and her sister's home in Monroeville. She has accepted honorary degrees but has declined to make speeches. In March 2005, she arrived via Amtrak in Philadelphia—her first trip to the city since signing with publisher Lippincott in 1960—to receive the inaugural ATTY Award for positive depictions of attorneys in the arts from the Spector Gadon & Rosen Foundation. At the urging of Peck's widow Veronique, Lee traveled by train from Monroeville to Los Angeles in 2005 to accept the Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award. She has also attended luncheons for students who have written essays based on her work held annually at the University of Alabama. On May 21, 2006, she accepted an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame. To honor her, the graduating seniors were given copies of Mockingbird before the ceremony and held them up when she received her degree.

In a letter published in Oprah Winfrey's magazine O (May 2006), Lee wrote about her early love of books as a child and her steadfast dedication to the written word: "Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books."

Harper Lee was portrayed by Catherine Keener in the film Capote (2005), by Sandra Bullock in the film Infamous (2006) and by Tracey Hoyt in the TV movie Scandalous Me: The Jacqueline Susann Story (1998). In the adaptation of Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1995), the character of Idabell Thompkins (Aubrey Dollar) is inspired by Truman Capote's memories of Harper Lee as a child.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1960 novel by Harper Lee, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. Lee's only novel, a coming of age novel, is told from the point of view of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, the young daughter of Atticus Finch, a lawyer in Maycomb, Alabama, a fictional small town in the Deep South of the United States. She is accompanied by her brother, Jem, and their mutual friend Dill.

For a book to be accessible forty years after it was first published is close to miraculous. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is that rare book. Since its publication in 1960 it has never been out of print. And with good reason --- it is one of the finest novels written in this century, and one of the most widely celebrated and read.

Scout Finch lives with her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus, a middle-aged lawyer, in Maycomb county, Alabama. One summer, Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Charles Baker Harris (Dill), who has come to live in their neighborhood for the summer, and the trio acts out stories together. Eventually, Dill becomes fascinated with the spooky house on their street called the Radley House. The house was owned by Mr. Radley, who had two sons, Nathan, who takes over the household after Mr. Radley's death, and Arthur (nicknamed Boo), who has lived there for years without venturing outside in daylight. Boo is infamous for the rumors that abound about him in Maycomb County as a result of his reclusiveness, the two most famous being that he once stabbed his father in the leg on an impulse, and that he sneaks out of the house every night, eats squirrels, cats and puppies and lurks outside of people's houses.

Scout goes to school for the first time that fall and detests it. It is on her first day in class that she is forced to come into contact with the children of two men important later on in the story: Mr. Walter Cunningham, the poorest man in town, and Mr. Bob Ewell, an infamous drunk, layabout and ne'er-do-well who has built a house on the town dump. She and Jem find gifts apparently left for them in a knothole of a tree on the Radley property. Dill returns the following summer, and he, Scout, and Jem begin to act out the story of Boo Radley. Atticus puts a stop to their antics, urging the children to try to see life from another person's perspective before making judgments. But on Dill's last night in Maycomb for the summer, the three sneak onto the Radley property, where Nathan Radley shoots at them. Jem loses his pants in the ensuing escape. When he returns for them, he finds them mended and hung over the fence. The next winter, Jem and Scout find presents in a tree left mysteriously for them. Presumably left by the mysterious Boo, Boo's brother Nathan Radley eventually plugs the knothole with cement claiming it was "diseased".

To the consternation of Maycomb's racist white community, Atticus agrees to defend a black man named Tom Robinson, who has been accused of raping Mayella Ewell. Because of Atticus's decision, Jem and Scout are subjected to abuse from other children, even when they celebrate Christmas at the family compound on Finch's Landing. Calpurnia, the Finches' black cook, takes them to the local black church, where the warm and close-knit community largely embraces the children.

Atticus's sister, Alexandra, comes to live with the Finches the next summer. Dill, who is supposed to live with his "new father" in another town who hasn't paid enough attention to him, runs away and comes to Maycomb. Scout finds him hiding under her bed. Tom Robinson's trial begins, and when the accused man is placed in the local jail, a mob gathers to lynch him. Atticus faces the mob down the night before the trial. Jem, Dill, and Scout, who sneaked out of the house, soon join him. Scout recognizes one of the men as Walter Cunningham, father of one of her schoolmates, and her polite questioning about his son shames him into dispersing the mob.

At the trial itself, the children sit in the "colored balcony" with the town's black citizens. Atticus provides clear evidence that the accusers, Mayella Ewell and her father, Bob, are lying: in fact, Mayella propositioned Tom Robinson, was caught by her father, and then accused Tom of rape to cover her shame and guilt. Atticus provides impressive evidence that the marks on Mayella's face are from wounds that her father inflicted; upon discovering her with Tom, he called her a whore and beat her. Yet, despite the significant evidence pointing to Tom's innocence, the all-white jury convicts him. The innocent Tom later tries to escape from prison and is shot seventeen times, killing him. In the aftermath of the trial, Jem's faith in justice is badly shaken because of the unbelieveable verdict, and he lapses into despondency and doubt as Tom Robinson's verdict was chosen by the jury clearly because he was black.

Despite the verdict, Bob Ewell feels that Atticus and the judge have made a fool out of him, and he vows revenge. He menaces Tom Robinson's widow, tries to break into the judge's house, spits in Atticus' face on a town street, and finally attacks Jem and Scout as they walk home from a Halloween pageant at their school. After a brief scuffle in the dark, in which Jem breaks his arm, Ewell disappears and Jem and Scout are discovered by an unnamed man and brought to their house. There, it is revealed that the man is, in fact, Boo Radley. The sheriff arrives with the news that Bob Ewell has died of a knife wound to the stomach; Atticus at first believes that Jem fatally stabbed Mr. Ewell in the struggle, but the sheriff insists that Ewell tripped over a tree root and fell on his own knife. It is evident (although unsaid) that Boo had actually intervened and killed Mr. Ewell to save the children; the sheriff wishes to protect the reclusive Boo, contrary to Atticus's belief, from the publicity certain to follow from the townspeople if they learned the truth of Boo's involvement. After sitting with Jem for a while, Scout is asked to walk Boo home. While standing on the Radley porch, Scout imagines many past events from Boo's perspective and feels sorry for him because she and Jem never gave him a chance, and never repaid him for the gifts that he had given them.

Walking home, she recalls all the events that have happened so far in the story (which have taken up about two or three years) and comes home to Atticus and a sedated Jem. While being tucked in, she remarks to Atticus that Boo Radley turned out to be a nice person; Atticus leaves her with the words: "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."

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