Harper Lee

For more information on Harper Lee, visit Britannica.com.

American writer Harper Lee (born 1926) is considered by many to be a literary icon. Her controversial novel To Kill a Mockingbird, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961.

Nelle Harper Lee was born April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, to Amasa Coleman and Frances (Finch) Lee. She is descended from Robert E. Lee, Civil War commander of the Confederate Army. Lee's father had been born in Butler County, Alabama, in 1880 and moved to Monroeville in 1913. He served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1927 to 1939, and was the model for Atticus Finch, hero of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Lee attended Huntingdon College, a private school for women in Montgomery, Alabama, from 1944 to 1945. She then transferred to the University of Alabama, which she attended from 1945 to 1950. While a student at Alabama, Lee contributed to several student publications, including the humor magazine Rammer-Jammer. In 1947, she enrolled at the University of Alabama School of Law. Lee traveled to England as an exchange student Oxford University. She left the University of Alabama six months short of completing her law degree, although she later was awarded an honorary degree by that institution. Lee's sister, Alice, did become a lawyer, and later took over their father's practice.

Lee moved to New York City in 1950, and worked for several years as an reservations clerk for Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways. When friends offered to loan her enough money to write full-time for a year, she quit her job and penned the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1957, she submitted the manuscript to a publishing house and began a two-year process of revision.

Travels With Truman Capote

Shortly after Lee finished the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, Truman Capote invited her to accompany him to Garden City, Kansas, in order to provide research for a non-fiction book involving the murder of a farm family. Lee and Capote traced their friendship back to 1928, when Capote moved to Monroeville to live with his aunts, who were the next-door-neighbors of the Lees. Lee based a character in To Kill a Mockingbird on Capote, and he partially based a character in his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, on her. Lee helped Capote conduct interviews. Later, he raved to George Plimpton of the New York Times Book Review that Lee was "a gifted woman, courageous, and with a warmth that instantly kindles most people, however suspicious or dour."

Lee made several trips to Kansas with Capote, including one to attend the opening of the 1960 trial. Capote's best-selling book In Cold Blood was published in 1965 by Random House bearing the dedication, "For Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee, with my love and gratitude."

Publication of To Kill A Mockingbird

In 1960, Lippincott published Lee's book. To Kill a Mockingbird takes place at the end of the Great Depression in the small Alabama town of Maycomb, which is modeled after Lee's hometown of Monroeville. The book covers three years in the life of its narrator, Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, who lives in Maycomb with her older brother, Jem, her widower father, Atticus, and the family housekeeper, Calpurnia. The story interweaves two plot lines. The main one is Atticus Finch's defense of an African-American man, Tom Robinson, falsely accused of raping a poor white woman. Although Robinson is clearly innocent, the jury finds him guilty, and he is killed trying to escape from prison. Finch's defense of Robinson makes him the lightening rod for the town's rage and fear of African-Americans.

The second plot line concerns Scout's and Jem's fascination with the notorious and eccentric local recluse, Boo Radley. Radley saves their lives when the father of Robinson's accuser tries to kill them on Halloween night. Both Robinson and Radley are symbolic of the mockingbird in the title, which comes from the proverb "it is a sin to kill a mockingbird." And according to Literature and Its Times, "the mockingbird is often regarded as the symbol of the South" and Lee chose it to "represent the devotion, purity of heart, and selflessness of [her] characters."

The story of To Kill a Mockingbird takes place during a tumultuous time in the South. The Great Depression, which began in 1929 and lasted through most of the 1930s, was particularly difficult for rural southerners, who saw much of their population leave family farms and cotton plantations for northern cities in search of education and work.

Lee is said to have been influenced greatly by the Scottsboro incident, which took place in the 1930s. Nine African-American men were accused of raping two white women. Every newspaper in Alabama covered the incident and several subsequent trials. Many parallels exist between the real Scottsboro trial and Lee' fictional trial of Robinson. When Lee began composing To Kill a Mockingbird, racial tensions were running high in the South as a whole, especially in Alabama. People all over the United States followed events like the 1955 omery bus boycott, launched by Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger. In addition, the United States Supreme Court had ruled in 1954 that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. This decision set off waves of violence as African-American students attempted to enroll at previously all-white institutions, including Lee's own alma mater, the University of Alabama.

Praise and Criticism

To Kill a Mockingbird won praise from both critics and readers. "In her first novel, Harper Lee writes with gentle affection, rich humor and deep understanding of small-town family life in Alabama," wrote Frank H. Lyell in the New York Times Book Review.

Reviewers registered a few criticisms. Some considered the book's ending to be overly dramatic and unnecessarily violent. Others questioned the accuracy of the narrator's voice, the young Scout. "The praise Miss Lee deserves must be qualified somewhat by noting that oftentimes Scout's expository style has a processed, homogenized, impersonal flatness quite out of keeping with the narrator's gay, impulsive approach to life in youth," Lyell wrote.

The book rose above censure to become an American literary icon. To Kill a Mockingbird was chosen as a Literary Guild selection, Book-of-the-Month Club alternate, Reader's Digest Condensed Book, and British Book Society Choice. In 1961, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, making Lee the first woman to receive the prize since 1942. By the time it won the Pulitzer Prize, To Kill a Mockingbird had sold 500,000 copies and had been translated into 10 languages. The same year, it was honored with the Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. The book won the Bestseller's Paperback Award for the year 1962, having sold four and a half million copies. Lee received an honorary degree from Mount Holyoke College. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Lee to the National Council on the Arts.

Stage and Screen Adaptations

"It is no disparagement of Miss Lee's winning book," Lyell observed in his 1960 article in New York Times Book Review "to say that it could be the basis of an excellent film." Less than a year after the book was published, the movie rights for To Kill a Mockingbird were purchased and the film was made by Universal Pictures. Although Lee opted not to write the screenplay, she did consult on the film, which was released in 1962. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning four. Gregory Peck won the "best actor" award for his portrayal of Atticus Finch. Horton Foote, an accomplished Southern writer, won the "best screenplay" award. The book also came to life on the stage. In 1969, Christopher Sergel released a play based on the book, which was produced on stages throughout the United States and in England.

Enduring Legacy

Even after the glitter of Hollywood faded, To Kill a Mockingbird continued to reach new audiences. By 1982, it had sold more than 15 million copies. In her critical study To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries, Claudia Durst Johnson quoted a study that found that To Kill a Mockingbird "has been consistently one of the ten most frequently required books in secondary schools since its publication in 1960." The controversial book has been faced with numerous efforts to have it banned. Many southerners in the 1960s objected to its portrayal of white people.

Johnson found a survey that ranked To Kill a Mockingbird "second only to the Bible in being most often cited as making a difference in people's lives." That rings true especially for attorneys, Johnson wrote, who in large numbers cited Atticus Finch as having inspired them to pursue the study of law.

Southerner James Carville, who served as campaign manager for U.S. President Bill Clinton, told the New Yorker in October of 1992 that To Kill a Mockingbird changed his life. "I just knew, the minute I read it, that she was right and I had been wrong," he said.

Lee never tried to follow up her first success. After To Kill a Mockingbird, the only things she published were two magazine articles, both in 1961. "Love - in Other Words" appeared in Vogue, and "Christmas to Me" was printed in McCall's. The McCall's article described the life-changing Christmas card she received one year, which was inscribed: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please."

In 1997, Christian Science Monitor reporter Leigh Montgomery wanted to discover what Lee had been doing in recent years. Her literary agent said the writer split her time between Monroeville and New York. She enjoyed reading Jane Austen, Charles Lamb, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Lee valued her privacy and did not grant interviews. Her solo utterance came in the 1995 introduction to the 35th anniversary edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. She wrote, "I am still alive although very quiet."

David Martindale, writing for the monthly feature "Where Are They Now?" for Biography magazine, interviewed Lee's cousin, Richard Williams. He shared, "I asked her one time why she never wrote another book. She told me, "When you have a hit like that, you can't go anywhere but down."

Further Reading

Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, edited by Jeff Chapman and Pamela S. Dear, Gale, 1996.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, 1990.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 6, edited by James E.Kibler, Jr., Gale, 1980.

Johnson, Claudia Durst, To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries, Twayne Publishers, 1994.

Literature and Its Times, edited by Joyce Moss and Wilson George, Gale, 1997.

Stuckey, W. J., The Pulitzer Prize Novels: A Critical Backward Look, University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.

Biography, September 1998, p. 24.

Christian Science Monitor, September 11, 1997.

Mississippi Quarterly, Winter 1996-1997.

New York Times Book Review, July 10, 1960; January 16, 1966.

Quotes:

"Folks don't like to have somebody around knowing more than they do. It aggravates em. You're not gonna change any of them by talking right, they've got to want to learn themselves, and when they don't want to learn there's nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language."

"I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system -- that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up."

"As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it -- whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash."

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

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view."

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

See more famous quotes by Harper Lee

Harper Lee
Harper Lee (right) with producer Alan J. Pakula in a 1962 publicity photo for the film of To Kill a Mockingbird
Born	April 28, 1926 (1926-04-28) (age 83) Monroeville, Alabama
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	American
Subjects	Literature
Literary movement	Southern Gothic
Influences Truman Capote, William Faulkner
Influenced David Watterson

Nelle Harper Lee (born April 28, 1926) is an American author known for her 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom of the United States for her contribution to literature in 2007.^[1]

Contents 1 Early life 1.1 To Kill a Mockingbird 1.2 To Kill a Mockingbird details 1.3 After To Kill a Mockingbird 1.4 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient 2 Fictional portrayals 3 Writings 4 References 5 External links

Early life

Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama on April 28, 1926, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham 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,^[2] and enrolled at the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery from 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.^[3][4] 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.

To Kill a Mockingbird

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 with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas."^[5] 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.

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.

– Harper Lee, quoted in Newquist—1964^[6]

To Kill a Mockingbird details

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 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.

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."^[7]

After To Kill a Mockingbird

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.^[8] During the mid-1980s, she began a factual book about an Alabama serial murderer, but also put it aside when she was not satisfied.^[8] 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".^[9] 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.

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.^[10][11] 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 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."^[12]

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."^[13]

Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient

President George W. Bush presents Harper Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House on November 5, 2007

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."^[14][15]

Fictional portrayals

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.

Writings

• Lee, Harper (1960) To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: J. B. Lippincott.
• Lee, Harper (1961) "Love—In Other Words". Vogue Magazine.
• Lee, Harper (1961) "Christmas to Me". McCall's Magazine.
• Lee, Harper (1965) "When Children Discover America". McCall's Magazine.

References

1. ^ President Bush Honors Medal of Freedom Recipients The White House Press Release from November 5, 2007
2. ^ Anderson, Nancy (2007-03-19). "Nelle Harper Lee". The Encyclopedia of Alabama. http://eoa.auburn.edu/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1126. Retrieved 2008-09-12. 
3. ^ "Harper Lee Biography". Biography.com. http://www.biography.com/search/article.do?id=9377021. Retrieved 2008-09-13. 
4. ^ Shields, Charles J. (2006-06-11). "'Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee: Good Scout". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/books/review/11keillor.html?pagewanted=print. Retrieved 2008-09-13. 
5. ^ "Harper Lee". NNDB.com. http://www.nndb.com/people/572/000025497/. Retrieved 2007-05-07. 
6. ^ Newquist, Roy, editor (1964). Counterpoint. Chicago: Rand McNally. ISBN 1-111-80499-0. 
7. ^ Nance, William (1970). The Worlds of Truman Capote. New York: Stein & Day. pp. 223. 
8. ^ ^{a b} "A writer's story: The mockingbird mystery". The Independent. 2006-06-04. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/a-writers-story-the-mockingbird-mystery-480965.html. Retrieved 2008-08-03. 
9. ^ Bellafante, Ginia (2006-01-30). "Harper Lee, Gregarious for a Day". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/books/30lee.html. Retrieved 2008-08-03. 
10. ^ Lacher, Irene. (May 21, 2005). "Harper Lee raises her low profile for a friend." Los Angeles Times
11. ^ Bellafante, Ginia. (January 30, 2006). "Harper Lee, Gregarious for a Day." New York Times. Books section.
12. ^ "Harper Lee writes item for Oprah’s magazine", MSNBC, June 29, 2006
13. ^ Author has her say; The Boston Globe, August 21, 2007
14. ^ Harper Lee given Presidential Medal of Freedom; The Birmingham News, November 5, 2007
15. ^ Author Lee receives top US honour; BBC News Online, November 6, 2007

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Harper Lee

• Harper Lee in the Encyclopedia of Alabama
• Harper Lee at the Internet Movie Database
• Harper Lee at the Internet Book List
• "Harper Lee Still Prizes Privacy Over Publicity" The Christian Science Monitor, September 11, 1997
• "Mockingbird author steps out of the shadows" The Guardian, February 5, 2006
• Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields, 2006
• "Harper Lee Emerges for 'Mockingbird' Award" All Things Considered, January 28, 2007

Persondata
NAME	Lee, Harper
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Lee, Nelle Harper
SHORT DESCRIPTION	novelist
DATE OF BIRTH	April 28, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH	Monroeville, Alabama
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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