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Harper Lee (b. 1926)

If Nelle Harper Lee ever wanted proof that fame has its drawbacks, she didn’t have to look farther than her childhood neighbor, Truman Capote. After her enormously successful first novel, her life has been as private as Capote’s was public.

Nelle – her first name is her grandmother’s spelled backward – was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. Her mother, Frances Cunningham Finch Lee, was a homemaker. Her father, Amasa Cole Lee, practiced law. 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.

As a child, Harper Lee was an unruly tomboy. She was bored with school and resisted any sort of conformity. The character of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird would have liked her. In high school, Lee was fortunate to have a gifted English teacher, Gladys Watson Burkett, who introduced her to challenging literature and the rigors of writing well. Lee loved the 19th century British authors best, and once said that her ambition was to become “the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”

Unable to fit in with the sorority she joined at the University of Alabama, she found a second home on the campus newspaper. Eventually, she entered law school, but she “loathed” it and went to New York to pursue her writing.

She spent eight years working odd jobs before she finally showed a manuscript to Tay Hohoff, an editor at J. B. Lippincott. At this point, it still resembled a string of stories more than the novel that Lee had intended. Under Hohoff’s guidance, two and a half years of rewriting followed.

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 to highly favorable reviews and quickly climbed the bestseller lists, where it remained for 88 weeks. In 1961, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize.