April 28, 2012 <Back to Index>
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Nelle Harper Lee (born April 28, 1926) is an American author best known for her 1960 Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which deals with the issues of racism that were observed by the author
as a child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Despite being Lee's
only published book, it led to Lee being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom of the United States for her contribution to literature in 2007. Lee
has also been the recipient of numerous honorary degrees, but has
always declined to make a speech. Other significant contributions of
Lee include assisting her close friend, Truman Capote, in his research for the book In Cold Blood. Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Her mother's name was Finch. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1926 to 1938. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and was best friends with her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote. In 1944, Lee graduated from Monroe County High School in Monroeville, and enrolled at the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery for one year, and pursued a law degree at the University of Alabama from 1945 to 1949, pledging the Chi Omega sorority. Lee wrote for several student publications and spent a year as editor of the campus humor magazine, Rammer Jammer. Though she did not complete the law degree, she studied for a summer in Oxford, England, before moving to New York City in 1950, where she worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC. Lee
continued as a reservation clerk until 1958, when she devoted herself
to writing. She lived a frugal life, traveling between her cold-water-only apartment in New York City and her family home in south central Alabama to care for her father. In
high school, Lee developed an interest in English literature. After
graduating in 1944, she went to the all-female Huntingdon College in
Montgomery. Lee stood apart from the other students — she could have
cared less about fashion, makeup, or dating. Instead, she focused on
her studies and on her writing. Lee was a member of the literary honor
society and the glee club. Transferring
to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, Lee was known for being a
loner and an individualist. She did make a greater attempt at a social
life there, joining a sorority for a while. Pursuing her interest in
writing, Lee contributed to the school’s newspaper and its humor
magazine, the Rammer Jammer. She eventually became the editor of the
Rammer Jammer. In
her junior year, Lee was accepted into the university’s law school,
which allowed students to work on law degrees while still
undergraduates. The demands of her law studies forced her to leave her
post as editor of the Rammer Jammer. After her first year in the law
program, Lee began expressing to her family that writing — not the
law — was her true calling. She went to Oxford University in England
that
summer as an exchange student. Returning to her law studies that fall,
Lee dropped out after the first semester. She soon moved to New York
City to follow her dreams to become a writer. In
1949, a 23-year-old Lee arrived in New York City. She struggled for
several years, working as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines and for
the British Overseas Air Corp (BOAC). While in the city, Lee was
reunited with old friend Truman Capote, one of the literary rising
stars of the time. She also befriended Broadway composer and lyricist
Michael Martin Brown and his wife Joy. 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 of a year's wages from them
with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you
please. Merry Christmas." She quit her job and devoted herself to her craft. Within a year, she had a first draft. Working with J. B. Lippincott & Co. 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 great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.
It remains a bestseller with more than 30 million copies in print. In
1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll 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 was 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. Harper Lee has downplayed autobiographical parallels. Yet Truman Capote, mentioning the character Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, described details he considered biographical: "In my original version of Other Voices, Other Rooms I
had that same man living in the house that used to leave things in the
trees, and then I took that out. He was a real man, and he lived just
down the road from us. We used to go and get those things out of the
trees. Everything she wrote about it is absolutely true. But you see, I
take the same thing and transfer it into some Gothic dream, done in an
entirely different way." After completing To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee accompanied Capote to Holcomb, Kansas,
to assist him in researching what they thought would be an article on a
small town's response to the murder of a farmer and his family. Capote
expanded the material into his best selling book, In Cold Blood (1966). Since 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 — The Long Goodbye — eventually filing it away unfinished. During
the mid 1980s, she began a factual book about an Alabama serial
murderer, but also put it aside when she was not satisfied. Her
withdrawal from public life prompted unfounded speculation that new
publications were in the works. Similar speculation followed the
American writers J.D. Salinger and Ralph Ellison. Lee said of the 1962 Academy Award winning screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird by Horton Foote: "I think it is one of the best translations of a book to film ever made". She also became a friend of Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, the father of the novel's narrator, Scout. She remains close to the
actor's family. Peck's grandson, Harper Peck Voll, is named after her. In June 1966, Lee was one of two persons named by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the National Council on the Arts. Lee
showed her feistiness in her 1966 letter to the editor in response to
the attempts of a Richmond, Virginia area school board to ban To Kill a Mockingbird as "immoral literature": Surely
it is plain to the simplest intelligence that “To Kill a Mockingbird”
spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor
and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all
Southerners. To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the
years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better
example of doublethink. I
feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism.
Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that
I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any
first grade of its choice. 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 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. On May 7, 2006, Lee wrote a letter to Oprah Winfrey (published in O, The Oprah Magazine in
July 2006). Lee wrote about her love of books as a child and her
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." While attending an August 20, 2007 ceremony inducting four members into the Alabama Academy
of Honor, Lee responded to an invitation to address the audience with
"Well, it's better to be silent than to be a fool."
On November 5, 2007, Lee was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush at a White House Ceremony. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian award in the United States and
recognizes individuals who have made "an especially meritorious
contribution to the security or national interests of the United
States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private
endeavors."
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, who was inspired by Truman Capote's memories of Harper Lee as a child, was played by Aubrey Dollar. |