harper lee biography essay

(1926-2016)

Who Was Harper Lee?

In July 2015, Lee published her second novel, Go Set a Watchman , which was written before To Kill a Mockingbird and portrays the later lives of the characters from her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. The youngest of four children, she grew up as a tomboy in a small town.

Her father was a lawyer, a member of the Alabama state legislature and also owned part of the local newspaper. For most of Lee's life, her mother suffered from mental illness, rarely leaving the house. It is believed that she may have had bipolar disorder.

In high school, Lee developed an interest in English literature. After graduating in 1944, she attended the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery. Lee stood apart from the other students—she couldn't have cared less about fashion, makeup or dating. Instead, she focused on her studies and 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 , eventually becoming the publication's editor.

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 Rammer Jammer editor.

After her first year in the program, Lee began expressing to her family that writing—not the law—was her true calling. She went to the University of Oxford 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 north to follow her dreams to become a writer.

Early Writing Career

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 befriended Broadway composer and lyricist Michael Martin Brown and his wife Joy. In 1956, the Browns gave Lee an impressive Christmas present—to support her for a year so that she could write full time. She quit her job and devoted herself to her craft.

The Browns also helped her find an agent, Maurice Crain. He, in turn, was able to get publisher J.B. Lippincott Company interested in her work. Working with editor Tay Hohoff, Lee worked on a manuscript set in a small Alabama town, which eventually became her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

Friendship With Truman Capote

One of Lee’s closest childhood friends was another writer-to-be, Truman Capote (then known as Truman Persons). Tougher than many of the boys, Lee often stepped up to serve as Truman's childhood protector.

Truman, who shared few interests with boys his age, was picked on for being sensitive and for the fancy clothes he wore. While the two friends were very different, they both had difficult home lives. Truman was living with his mother's relatives in town after largely being abandoned by his own parents.

While in New York City in the 1950s, Lee was reunited with her old friend Capote, who was by then one of the literary rising stars of the time.

In 1956, Lee joined forces with Capote to assist him with an article he was writing for The New Yorker . Capote was writing about the impact of the murder of four members of the Clutter family on their small Kansas farming community.

The two traveled to Kansas to interview townspeople, friends and family of the deceased and the investigators working to solve the crime.

Serving as his research assistant, Lee helped with the interviews, eventually winning over some of the locals with her easygoing, unpretentious manner. Truman, with his flamboyant personality and style, had a hard time initially getting himself into his subjects' good graces.

During their time in Kansas, the Clutters' suspected killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were caught in Las Vegas and brought back for questioning. Lee and Capote got a chance to interview the suspects not long after their arraignment in January 1960.

Soon after, Lee and Capote returned to New York. She worked on the galleys for her forthcoming first novel while he started working on his article, which would evolve into the nonfiction masterpiece In Cold Blood .

The pair returned to Kansas for the murder trial. Lee gave Capote all of her notes on the crime, the victims, the killers, the local communities and much more.

Lee worked with Capote on and off on In Cold Blood . She had been invited by Smith and Hickock to witness their execution in 1965, but she declined. When Capote's book was finally published in 1966, a rift developed between the two collaborators for a time.

Capote dedicated the book to Lee and his longtime lover, Jack Dunphy, but failed to acknowledge her contributions to the work. While Lee was very angry and hurt by this betrayal, she remained friends with Capote for the rest of his life.

READ MORE: Harper Lee and Truman Capote Were Childhood Friends Until Jealously Tore Them Apart

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Lee published two books in her lifetime: To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Go Set a Watchman (2015). She also worked on and off with her friend Capote on his famed book, In Cold Blood (1966).

'To Kill a Mockingbird'

In July 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was published and picked up by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild . A condensed version of the story appeared in Reader's Digest magazine. The following year, the novel won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and several other literary awards. A classic of American literature, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages with more than a million copies sold each year.

The work's central character, a young girl nicknamed Scout, was not unlike Lee in her youth. In one of the book's major plotlines, Scout and her brother Jem and their friend Dill explore their fascination with a mysterious and somewhat infamous neighborhood character named Boo Radley.

The work was more than a coming-of-age story: another part of the novel reflected racial prejudices in the South. Their attorney father, Atticus Finch, tries to help a Black man who has been charged with raping a white woman to get a fair trial and to prevent him from being lynched by angry white people in a small town.

'Go Set a Watchman'

Lee published her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, in July 2015. The story was essentially a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird and followed the later lives of the novel’s characters.

Go Set a Watchman was submitted to a publisher in 1957. When the book wasn't accepted, Lee's editor asked her to revise the story and make her main character Scout a child. The author worked on the story for two years and it eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird.

Lee's Go Set a Watchman was thought to be lost until it was discovered by her lawyer Tonja Carter in a safe deposit box. In February 2015, it was announced that HarperCollins would publish the manuscript on July 14, 2015.

Go Set a Watchman features Mockingbird's Scout as a 26-year-old woman on her way back home to Maycomb, Alabama, from New York City. Scout's father Atticus, the upstanding moral conscience of To Kill a Mockingbird , is portrayed as a racist with bigoted views and ties to the Ku Klux Klan .

In Watchman, Atticus tells Scout: "Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

The controversial novel and shocking portrayal of a beloved character sparked debates among fans, and offered literary scholars and students fodder for analyzing the author's creative process. Lee's second novel also broke pre-sale records for HarperCollins.

With reports of 88-year-old Lee's faltering health, questions arose about whether the publication was the author's decision. Lee issued a statement through Carter: "I’m alive and kicking and happy as hell with the reactions to Watchman ."

But even that message didn't put an end to questions: In a 2011 letter, Lee's sister Alice had written that Lee would "sign anything put before her by any one in whom she has confidence." However, others who had met with Lee stated that she was behind the decision to publish. Alabama officials investigated and found no evidence that she was a victim of coercion.

'To Kill a Mockingbird' Movie

Playwright Horton Foote wrote a screenplay based on the book and used the same title for a 1962 To Kill a Mockingbird movie adaptation. Lee visited the set during filming and did a lot of interviews to support the project.

The movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird earning eight Academy Award nominations and won three awards, including best actor for Gregory Peck 's portrayal of Finch. The character is said to have been based on Lee's father.

Later Years

In the mid-1960s, Lee was reportedly working on another novel, but it was never published.

In 1966, Lee had an operation on her hand to repair the damage done by a bad burn. She also accepted a post on the National Council of the Arts at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson . During the 1970s and '80s, Lee largely retreated from public life.

Lee spent some of her time on a nonfiction book project about an Alabama serial killer which had the working title The Reverend . This work, however, was never published.

Lee generally lived a quiet, private life, splitting her time between New York City and her hometown of Monroeville. In Monroeville, she lived with her older sister Alice Lee, a lawyer who the author called "Atticus in a skirt." Lee's sister was a close confidante who often took care of the author's legal and financial affairs.

Active in her church and community, Lee became famous for avoiding the spotlight of her celebrity. She would often use the wealth she had accumulated from her success to make anonymous philanthropic donations to various charitable causes.

In November 2007, President George W. Bush presented Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her "outstanding contribution to America's literary tradition" at a ceremony at the White House.

Her sister Alice once said about Lee, "Books are the things she cares about." With the assistance of a magnifying device—necessary due to her macular degeneration—Lee was able to keep reading despite her ailments.

Lawsuits and E-Publishing Deal

In May 2013, Lee filed a lawsuit in federal court against literary agent Samuel Pinkus. Lee charged that, in 2007, Pinkus "engaged in a scheme to dupe" her out of the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird , later diverting royalties from the work. In September 2013, a settlement was reached in the lawsuit.

Later that year, Lee's legal team filed suit against the Monroe County Heritage Museum located in Monroeville for trying "to capitalize on the fame" of To Kill a Mockingbird and for selling unauthorized merchandise related to the novel. Lawyers for the author and the museum later filed a joint motion to end the suit, and the case was dismissed by a federal judge in February 2014.

That same year, Lee allowed her famous work to be released as an e-book. She signed a deal with HarperCollins for the company to release To Kill a Mockingbird as an e-book and digital audio editions.

In a release shared by the publisher, Lee explained: "I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries. I am amazed and humbled that Mockingbird has survived this long. This is Mockingbird for a new generation."

Lee died on February 19, 2016, at the age of 89. Her nephew, Hank Connor, said the author died in her sleep.

In 2007, Lee suffered a stroke and struggled with various ongoing health issues, including hearing loss, limited vision and problems with her short-term memory. After the stroke, Lee moved into an assisted living facility in Monroeville.

Around the time of Lee’s death in 2016, it was announced that producer Scott Rudin had hired Aaron Sorkin to write a stage version of To Kill a Mockingbird . In March 2018, several months before the production's scheduled Broadway debut, Lee's estate filed a lawsuit on the grounds that Sorkin's adaptation significantly deviated from the original material.

A main point of contention was the play's portrayal of Finch, which reportedly showed him in early scenes as more in step with the oppressive racial feelings of the time, as opposed to the heroic crusader of the novel.

Rudin pushed back against the assertion that the characters were significantly altered, though he insisted he had leeway to adapt them to contemporary times. "I can’t and won’t present a play that feels like it was written in the year the book was written in terms of its racial politics: It wouldn’t be of interest," he said. "The world has changed since then."

The portrayal of Atticus Finch was reportedly softened from someone “who drinks alcohol, keeps a gun and curses mildly” to an “honest and decent person.” The play hit Broadway in December 2018.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Harper Lee
• Birth Year: 1926
• Birth date: April 28, 1926
• Birth State: Alabama
• Birth City: Monroeville
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Harper Lee is best known for writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and 'Go Set a Watchman,' which portrays the later years of the Finch family.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Taurus
• Oxford University
• Huntington College
• University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa
• Death Year: 2016
• Death date: February 19, 2016
• Death State: Alabama
• Death City: Monroeville
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Harper Lee Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/harper-lee
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 31, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.
• Simply because we are licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try and win.
• I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.
• People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.
• Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself ... it's a self-exploratory operation that is endless.
• Things are always better in the morning.
• The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
• Everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowing.
• I would advise to anyone who aspires to a writing career, that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide.

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Harper Lee Biography

“Nelle” Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. She grew up in Monroeville, a small town in southwest Alabama. Her father was a lawyer who also served in the state legislature from 1926–1938. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader. After she attended public school in Monroeville she attended Huntingdon College, a private school for women in Montgomery for a year and then transferred to the University of Alabama. After graduation, Lee studied at Oxford University. She returned to the University of Alabama to study law but withdrew six months before graduation.

She moved to New York in 1949 and worked as a reservations clerk for Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways. While in New York, she wrote several essays and short stories, but none were published. Her agent encouraged her to develop one short story into a novel. In order to complete it, Lee quit working and was supported by friends who believed in her work. In 1957, she submitted the manuscript to J. B. Lippincott Company. Although editors found the work too episodic, they saw promise in the book and encouraged Lee to rewrite it. In 1960, with the help of Lippincott editor Tay Hohoff, To Kill a Mockingbird was published.

To Kill a Mockingbird became an instant popular success. A year after the novel was published, 500,000 copies had been sold and it had been translated into 10 languages. Critical reviews of the novel were mixed. It was only after the success of the film adaptation in 1962 that many critics reconsidered To Kill a Mockingbird .

To Kill a Mockingbird was honored with many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and was made into a film in 1962 starring Gregory Peck. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It actually was honored with three awards: Gregory Peck won the Best Actor Award, Horton Foote won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar and a design team was awarded an Oscar for Best Art Direction/Set Decoration B/W. Lee worked as a consultant on the screenplay adaptation of the novel.

Author Truman Capote was Lee’s next-door neighbor from 1928 to 1933. In 1959 Lee and Capote traveled to Garden City, Kan., to research the Clutter family murders for his work, In Cold Blood (1965). Capote dedicated In Cold Blood to Lee and his partner Jack Dunphy. Lee was the inspiration for the character Idabel in Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). He in turn clearly influenced her character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird .

Harper Lee divides her time between New York and her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., where her sister Alice Lee practices law. Though she has published no other work of fiction, this novel continues to have a strong impact on successive generations of readers.

Harper Lee had many childhood experiences that are similar to those of her young narrator in To Kill a Mockingbird , Scout Finch:

Harper Lee’s Childhood

• She grew up in the 1930s in a rural southern Alabama town.
• Her father, Amasa Lee, is an attorney who served in the state legislature in Alabama.
• Her older brother and young neighbor (Truman Capote) are playmates.
• Harper Lee is an avid reader as a child.
• She is 6 years old when the Scottsboro trials are widely covered in national, state and local newspapers.

Scout Finch’s Childhood

• Her father, Atticus Finch, is an attorney who served in the state legislature in Alabama.
• Her older brother (Jem) and young neighbor (Dill) are playmates.
• Scout reads before she enters school and reads the Mobile Register newspaper in first grade.
• She is 6 years old when the trial of Tom Robinson takes place.

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The New York Times

Books | harper lee: her life and work.

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Harper Lee: Her Life and Work

By JOHN WILLIAMS and TAMARA BEST FEB. 19, 2016

Harper Lee, the beloved author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” died on Friday in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala. She was 89. Below is a look at the pivotal moments in her life and career. Related Article

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is about a girl named Scout Finch and her father, Atticus, a small-town lawyer who defends a young black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. The novel appeared in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961.

In The Times, Herbert Mitgang wrote: “Here is a storyteller justifying the novel as a form that transcends time and place.”

Frank H. Lyell’s review for The New York Times Book Review concluded presciently: “Movie-going readers will be able to cast most of the roles very quickly, but it is no disparagement of Miss Lee’s winning book to say that it could be the basis of an excellent film.”

Read Herbert Mitgang’s review of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” (Times Machine)

Read Frank H. Lyell’s review. (pdf)

“To Kill a Mockingbird” has since sold more than 40 million copies. It continues to be one of the most widely taught books, a staple of high school reading lists across the country. When the Modern Library compiled a list of the 100 best novels , according to readers, it came in at No. 5.

In 1962, a film adaptation of the novel, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, was a big success with critics and audiences. In The Times, Bosley Crowther called it a “fine” and “rewarding” film, though he felt that “for all the picture’s feeling for children, it doesn’t tell us very much of how they feel.”

The movie was nominated for eight Oscars , including Best Picture. Peck won the award for Best Actor, and his performance cemented Atticus Finch in the public’s mind as “the embodiment of fearless integrity, magnanimity and common sense,” as Frank H. Lyell had described him in the Book Review.

Read The Times’s review of the movie.

Two of the South’s greatest writers, Ms. Lee and Truman Capote, grew up as friends in Monroeville, Ala., and drew inspiration from each other as they began their literary careers in New York City.

Ms. Lee borrowed from their friendship in her portrait of the characters Scout and Dill in her novels. Mr. Capote based the brash, sharp-tongued tomboy Idabel Thompkins, from his debut novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” on Ms. Lee. The two also worked together on Mr. Capote’s true crime classic, “In Cold Blood,” then drifted apart.

Read about the friendship of Harper Lee and Truman Capote.

After the massive literary and cinematic success of “Mockingbird,” Ms. Lee consciously withdrew from the public eye, living in Alabama and uniformly declining interview requests. For decades, she was silent while readers wondered if she was still writing, or if she would ever publish anything again.

Read more about Harper Lee’s bigoraphy.

In 2015, 55 years after the publication of “Mockingbird,” Ms. Lee’s publisher announced the imminent appearance of “Go Set a Watchman.” The second novel , also featuring Atticus and Scout, had been written decades earlier — in fact, it was written before “Mockingbird,” even though its action took place later in time.

The news generated heated reaction, including dismay from some readers who worried the new book wouldn’t live up to “Mockingbird,” or that the 88-year-old Ms. Lee didn’t truly want another novel published. After responding to at least one complaint of potential elder abuse related to the publication, the state of Alabama interviewed the author in 2015. Friends and acquaintances offered conflicting accounts of Ms. Lee’s mental state, with some describing her as engaging, lively and sharp, and others painting her as childlike, depressed and often confused. Several people said that her condition varied day to day.

Read about the announcement of the new novel’s publication.

Read about how the new novel was discovered.

Read about Alabama’s investigation.

Read more about the investigation and its aftermath.

Read about Harper Lee’s defense of the novel’s publication.

“Watchman” was published last July, and Atticus Finch’s transformation into an older, less idealistic, even bigoted character left many readers and critics perplexed.

In The Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote: “The depiction of Atticus in ‘Watchman’ makes for disturbing reading, and for ‘Mockingbird’ fans, it’s especially disorienting. Scout is shocked to find, during her trip home, that her beloved father, who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion, has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares her horror and confusion.”

The twist spurred much debate about Atticus and his moral integrity in “Mockingbird.” The character had long been a cultural icon whose influence transcended literature, inspiring generations of lawyers, teachers and social workers. After the initial shock, some writers and literary critics saw value in a more complex, flawed version of Atticus.

Read Michiko Kakutani’s review of “Go Set a Watchman.”

Read about readers’ responses to the book.

Harper Lee, Author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Dies at 89

In Harper Lee’s Novels, a Loss of Innocence as Children and Again as Adults

Writers, Teachers and Lawyers React to Harper Lee’s Death

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Review: Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ Gives Atticus Finch a Dark Side

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By Thomas Mallon

“Harper Lee is the moral conscience of the film,” Bennett Miller, the director of “Capote,” explains in an interview included on the movie’s DVD. “We were looking for an actor who had composure and dignity and a maturity of spirit and a morality and a sober-mindedness.” But though Miller acknowledges that “people who have those qualities tend not to go into acting, as a rule,” he fails to note that such people do not tend to swell the ranks of creative writers, either. Any viewer of Catherine Keener’s lambent performance in “Capote” is prepared to believe that she possesses all these traits, but they would not naturally recommend her for an authentic portrayal of the plain and sometimes stubborn Harper Lee, the subject of Charles J. Shields’s new biography, “Mockingbird” (Holt; $25).

During the Second World War, Lee, a student at Huntingdon College, in Montgomery, shunned the standard cardigan-and-pearls attire of the all-female institution in favor of a bomber jacket she’d been given by her brother, an Army Air Corps cadet. Her language was “salty,” and she sometimes smoked a pipe, and, while her face seems to have been pleasantly approachable, she described herself as “ugly as sin.” After she transferred to the undergraduate law program at the University of Alabama, mostly to please her father, her lack of polish struck some as ill-suited to the judicial decorum she was being trained to observe.

Growing up, she had preferred tackle to touch football, and tended to bully her friends, including the young Truman Capote, who, during the late nineteen-twenties and the thirties, was fobbed off by his feckless mother on relatives who lived in Lee’s home town, Monroeville. He put her into his fiction at least twice—as Idabel Tompkins (“I want so much to be a boy”), in “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” and as Ann (Jumbo) Finchburg, in “The Thanksgiving Visitor.” Lee did the same for him in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” turning the boy Truman into Dill, an effeminate schemer with an enormous capacity for lying. One year, Lee’s father gave her and Truman a twenty-pound Underwood typewriter, which the two children managed to shift back and forth between their houses and use in the composition of collaborative fictions about the neighbors.

In 1959, when Capote asked Lee to accompany him to Kansas while he looked into the murder of the Clutter family, he was thirty-five and already famous, a sort of self-hatched Fabergé egg—the author of high-gloss magazine journalism, some dankly suggestive Southern-gothic fiction, and the silvery “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Lee was just reaching the end of a decade-long literary struggle. After dropping out of the University of Alabama, in 1948, the year Capote published his first book, she had gone to New York to write one of her own, despite her father’s apparent belief that literary success was unlikely to favor Monroeville twice. In the city, she scrounged for change in parking meters and used an old wooden door for a writing desk. She spent most of the fifties living in Yorkville, on the Upper East Side, working as an airline ticket agent and failing to impress the other artistically ambitious Southerners she ran into. “Here was this dumpy girl from Monroeville,” one of them recalled years later. “We didn’t think she was up to much. She said she was writing a book, and that was that.”

Michael Brown, a lyricist who worked with Capote on a musical adapted from his story “House of Flowers,” became, along with his wife, Joy, a crucial friend and benefactor. In 1956, as a Christmas present, they gave Lee enough money to take a year off from her job. Brown also steered her toward the husband-and-wife agents Maurice Crain and Annie Laurie Williams, who had sold the movie rights to “Gone with the Wind.” The couple were cool to Lee’s short stories, but were willing to take a chance on a novel called, first, “Go Set a Watchman”; then, at Maurice Crain’s suggestion, “Atticus”; and, finally, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The Crains sold the book to Lippincott, and Lee was nervously awaiting the galleys when she got Capote’s call about the Clutter killings.

For much of the past forty years, ever since it began to look as if Lee would not publish a second novel, a story has persisted that it was actually Capote who wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He did suggest some cuts, but extensive editorial correspondence between Lee and her agents and publishers argues for her authorship, as does Shields’s reminder of “Truman’s inability to keep anybody’s secrets.” Since the appearance of Bennett Miller’s film, however, it is Lee’s role in Capote’s work that has been the subject of literary discussion. Shields cites scholarly and hearsay evidence that Lee was angry at having her contribution to “In Cold Blood” slighted and at being made to share the book’s dedication with Capote’s lover, Jack Dunphy. Like Miller’s movie, this new biography seems to be a brief for her indispensability to Capote’s nonfiction novel. She becomes a kind of collaborator, not just someone who smoothed the author’s way among the weathered and suspicious residents of Finney County, Kansas. Capote did give Lee credit for being “extremely helpful” in “making friends with the wives of the people I wanted to meet,” but he had brought her along principally as a confirmatory pair of eyes and ears.

The hundred and fifty pages of notes she took show that she was operating in Kansas with the confidence of a soon-to-be-published writer. She was unafraid to propose to Capote a much darker view of the Clutters than the one he was beginning to set down himself. Interviews she conducted, and her inspection of the family’s house, convinced her that the Clutters’ emotional arrangements had been inhumanly rigid, enough to have turned the mother, Bonnie, into “one of the world’s most wretched women,” a nervous, medicated creature, bedridden with the sense that she had failed her go-getting husband. What Lee took to be the strange and greedy behavior of the two oldest Clutter daughters, who had moved out of the house before the murders, sealed her impression of a tight collective misery that must have rendered the existence of Nancy Clutter, the perfectionist teen-ager who was shot along with her parents and brother, an ongoing torment. How, Lee wondered in her notebook, had the girl avoided “cracking at the seams”?

Capote wasn’t having it. He might allow the two killers some psychological mystery, tilting them toward humanity here and there in the narrative, but his victims had a purely literary job to do; as Shields points out, the author required “an idealized Clutter family.” In the end, Lee’s urgings toward complication make us wonder less about why Capote resisted them than about why Lee herself, in her own single, famous book, allowed the war between good and evil to be such a simple matter.

Mr. A. C. Lee, the father of Nelle Harper Lee and the model for Atticus Finch, was never a widower raising children by himself. His wife, Frances Finch Lee, remained alive, if impaired, throughout the childhood of Nelle and her older siblings. Musical, overweight, and sometimes loudly difficult, she suggests an inversion of the birdlike, timid Bonnie Clutter. Her behavior placed a considerable strain on Nelle, who eventually, according to Shields, “wiped the slate clean of the conflict between herself and her mother” by killing off Mrs. Atticus Finch before “To Kill a Mockingbird” even begins.

Mr. Lee was a “fond and indulgent father,” who, in addition to practicing law, edited Monroeville’s local paper and served in the state legislature. He believed in segregation, low taxes, and noblesse oblige, and, as an elder of the First United Methodist Church, was prepared to scold the pastor for too much sermonizing about racial prejudice and unfair labor conditions. “Get off the ‘social justice’ and get back on the Gospel,” he ordered the Reverend Ray Whatley, in 1952. The minister was soon associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., and as the fifties wore on Mr. Lee himself became much more progressive about civil-rights issues. Ambivalent and stretchable, he seems, all in all, a more interesting figure than Atticus Finch, the plaster saint for whom he provided the mold.

In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” empathy is Atticus’s chief and much repeated prescription for all that ails us morally. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” he tells his daughter, Scout. That goes for her teacher, Miss Caroline Fisher; for the head of a lynch mob; and for the man who eventually tries to kill Scout and her brother. Atticus’s speech can be as stiff as his rectitude (“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience”), and in conversation with his children he tends toward the stagey and the sententious. The novel sometimes makes up for dramatic shortcomings by squeezing yet another puff of rhetoric from its adult protagonist, who fishes for compliments (“Sometimes I think I’m a total failure as a parent”) and has a way of making forbearance itself insufferable.

The tomboyish Scout is probably a truer refraction of Harper Lee’s youth than Catherine Keener is of her early adulthood. But Scout, too, is a kind of highly constructed doll, feisty and cute on every subject from algebra to grownups (“They don’t get around to doin’ what they say they’re gonna do half the time”). In real life, children do not tell their elders “You don’t understand children much”; but Scout does.

More troublesome than the dialogue, Lee’s narrative voice is a wildly unstable compound, a forced mixture—sometimes in the same sentence—of Scout’s very young perspective and a fully adult one. Phrases like “throughout my early life” and “when we were small” serve only to jar us out of a past that we’ve already been seeing, quite clearly, through the eyes of the little girl. Information that has been established gets repeated, and the book’s sentences are occasionally so clumsy that a reader can’t visualize the action before being asked to picture its opposite: “A flash of plain fear was going out of [Atticus’s] eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light.”

Indisputably, much in the novel works. Ladies with “frostings of sweat and sweet talcum” and “rain-rotted gray houses” are finely evoked, as is the way Lee’s Monroeville (called Maycomb in the novel) believes in the hereditary replication of all human gesture and behavior. But a reader cannot help feeling that he has been transported to a Booth Tarkington novel, a Southern version of “Penrod” or “Seventeen,” where summer goes by “in routine contentment,” until the author, a few chapters in, suffers a fit of high seriousness. The theme of justice descends upon the book like the opening of school. Late in 1960, in commenting on the book’s success, Flannery O’Connor declared, “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book.”

The novel’s courtroom drama doesn’t derive, as has often been assumed, from the nineteen-thirties case of the Scottsboro Boys. Late in the nineteen-nineties, Lee revealed to a biographer of Richard Wright that she had based the trial of Tom Robinson on the experience of Walter Lett, a Negro whose arrest for raping a white woman was reported in the Monroe Journal on November 9, 1933. Whatever the source, the novel requires Tom Robinson’s conviction as surely as the town itself does. Without it, the reader will not have the chance, like the Negroes in the courthouse balcony, to stand up and salute Atticus’s nobly futile defense.

The book never persists in ambiguity. Mr. Underwood, a man who “despises Negroes” but protects Atticus with a shotgun, is glimpsed a couple of times and then dropped. The author prefers returning to the feel-good and the improbable, such as the Ku Klux Klan story that Atticus tells his children: “They paraded by Mr. Sam Levy’s house one night, but Sam just stood on his porch and told ’em things had come to a pretty pass, he’d sold ’em the very sheets on their backs. Sam made ’em so ashamed of themselves they went away.” If it were this easy, Atticus would have won Tom Robinson’s acquittal. By the time the novel nears its conclusion and a classmate of Scout’s gives a report on how bad Hitler is, the book has begun to cherish its own goodness.

Boo Radley, the agonized recluse living just down the street from the Finches, remains hidden and tantalizing for most of the novel, almost like the authorial imagination that never quite frees itself from fine sentiment. But in the end Boo, too, is there to do good; once he’s done it, Scout takes him by the hand and leads him out of the book.

According to Shields, reviews of the novel, which came out in 1960, left Lee with feelings of “dizzying joy” and “vindication.” After selling the first few hundred thousand copies of an eventual thirty million, the book went on to win the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and to become, in Shields’s estimation, “like Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Portnoy’s Complaint, On the Road, The Bell Jar, Soul on Ice , and The Feminine Mystique —books that seized the imagination of the post-World War II generation—a novel that figured in changing ‘the system.’ ”

But if it’s true that by 1988 the book “was taught in 74 percent of the nation’s public schools”—a statistic issued by the National Council of Teachers of English, who are apparently uninclined to make an old-fashioned fuss over the book’s dangling modifiers—it is less because the novel was likely to stimulate students toward protest than because it acted as a kind of moral Ritalin, an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious. “How can you be an Atticus?” asks one piece of curricular material to be found posted on the Web. Shields is able to cite a scholar, Claudia Durst Johnson, “who has published extensively” on this single book, which “readers in surveys rank as the most influential in their lives after the Bible.” For all that, readers returning to the book after many years may find themselves echoing the film Capote’s boozed-up muttering about “To Kill a Mockingbird”: “I frankly don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

Actually, this remark is made in connection with the 1962 movie version of the novel, a movie that, like the film adaptation of “Gone with the Wind,” is rather better than the original material. Lee’s agents handled the book with care, getting it into the sensitive hands of the director Robert Mulligan and the producer Alan J. Pakula. To play Atticus, Lee wanted Spencer Tracy and Universal wanted Rock Hudson; Bing Crosby wanted himself. The part went to Gregory Peck, an actor so closely associated with “composure and dignity and a maturity of spirit and a morality and a sober-mindedness” that, years later, “Capote” ’s Bennett Miller may have momentarily thought of him for Harper Lee.

Peck’s performance is top-heavy with a kind of civic responsibility, and a Yankee frost often kills his carefully tended Southern accent, but his Atticus is still more subtle than the book’s. Credit here must go to Horton Foote’s screenplay, which, unlike most Hollywood adaptations, tends to prune rather than gild the dialogue from its published source. In the book, Scout asks Atticus if he really is a “nigger-lover,” as she’s heard him called, and he responds, “I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody.” Foote skips this cloying exchange, and has the father explain himself with a less self-regarding line from the book: “I’m simply defending a Negro.” The same principle of selection is at work when it comes to Jem’s exasperation with his sister. Foote uses a close variant of a plain line from Lee (“I swear, Scout, you act more like a girl all the time”), rather than the archly implausible line (“You act so much like a girl it’s mortifyin’ ”) that she also makes available.

The novel is full of set pieces that provide either local color or the opportunity for some Aesopian underlining of Atticus’s rectitude. Mulligan filmed and then cut an episode in which Mrs. Dubose, a local termagant, is shown trying to free herself from a secret morphine habit before she dies. Good as the actress Ruth White’s performance of the scene was, “it stopped the film,” Pakula realized. The episode stops the novel, too, but provides Atticus with the chance to make a speech about courage (“She was the bravest person I ever knew”). Lubricated with the syrup of Elmer Bernstein’s score, the movie has a propulsion that the novel never achieves. The film even solves the book’s vocal problems, extracting bits of the adult narrative line to use, sparingly, as voice-over.

Flush with the success of “In Cold Blood,” Capote threw the famous Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel. With her new wealth from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Lee purchased a statue of John Wesley for the First United Methodist Church of Monroeville. She had more or less ceased giving interviews by 1964, and stuck to a quiet pattern of spending part of the year in New York and part in Alabama, where even now her ninety-four-year-old sister Alice acts as gatekeeper. She has, of late, been a bit more conspicuously out and about—attending a ninetieth-birthday party for Horton Foote in New York—but the privacy of her past several decades allows Shields reasonably to argue that Capote’s public unravelling may have acted for her as a cautionary tale.

Lee has resisted biographers, including Shields, whose requests for coöperation, he says, she “declined with vigor.” A former high-school teacher who has written nonfiction books for young adults, Shields has been enterprising in the face of frustration, basing his biography “on six hundred interviews and other sorts of communication with Harper Lee’s friends, associates, and former classmates.” He offers the book as a kind of homemade present, whose “unorthodox methods” include some slightly imaginative reconstructions, at least one Internet anecdote, and a tendency to pad or wander from the subject when his material runs thin. If the biographer sometimes loses a sense of proportion, that’s understandable enough with a life as front-loaded as Lee’s.

Predictably, any number of her personal mysteries remain unsolved at the biography’s end. Did Lee have a romance with an Alabama professor? Did she have what Shields calls “a chaste affair” with Maurice Crain? Capote once hinted at something unhappy between them, and Shields is tempted to see a lack of evidence on this subject as being the evidence itself: “Among [Crain’s] papers at Columbia University, there is not a single piece of correspondence from Nelle. It’s as if the collection was scoured clean of the relationship.”

The greatest mystery, of course, is why Lee never published a second novel, and whether she even got very far in writing one. Absent some late-life efflorescence, “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be it for her, despite a once professed desire to become “the Jane Austen of south Alabama” and a claim, in the years just after the novel’s publication, to be spending between six and twelve hours a day at her desk. As time went on, her editor grew impatient, and her agents became anxious. Eventually, they stopped asking. Shields attributes to Alice the report that, sometime in the nineteen-seventies, “just as Nelle was finishing the novel, a burglar broke into her apartment and stole the manuscript.” What Lee may share most with Capote—who was forever promising and not delivering “Answered Prayers”—is a kind of flamboyant silence, the typewriter they once passed back and forth under the summer sun having become, for both of them, thirty years later, too hot not to cool down. ♦

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Biography of Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926 to Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Harper Lee grew up in the small southwestern town of Monroeville in Alabama. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who also served on the state legislature (1926-38). As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and she enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote, who provided the basis of the character of Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird .

Lee was only five years old in when, in April 1931 in the small town of Scottsboro in Alabama, the first trials began with regard to the purported rapes of two white women by nine young black men. The defendants, who were nearly lynched before being brought to court, were not provided with the services of a lawyer until the first day of trial. Despite medical testimony that the women had not been raped, the all-white jury found the men guilty of the crime and sentenced all but the youngest, a twelve-year-old boy, to death. Six years of subsequent trials saw most of these convictions repealed and all but one of the men freed or paroled. The Scottsboro case left a deep impression on the young Lee, who would use it later as the rough basis for the events in To Kill a Mockingbird .

Lee studied first at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama (1944-45), and then pursued a law degree at the University of Alabama (1945-49), spending one year abroad at Oxford University. She worked as a reservation clerk for Eastern Airlines in New York City until the late 1950s, when she resolved to devote herself to writing. Lee lived a frugal lifestyle, traveling between her cold-water-only apartment in New York to her family home in Alabama to care for her ailing father. In addition, she worked in Holcombe, Kansas as a research assistant for Truman Capote's novel In Cold Blood in 1959. Ever since the first days of their childhood friendship, Capote and Lee remained close friends.

Lee published her first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird , in 1960 after a two-year period of revising and rewriting under the guidance of her editor, Tay Hohoff, of the J. B. Lippincott Company. To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize despite mixed critical reviews. The novel was highly popular, selling more than fifteen million copies. Though in composing the novel she delved into her own experiences as a child in Monroeville, Lee intended for the book to impart the sense of any small town in the Deep South, as well as the universal characteristics of human beings. The book was made into a successful movie in 1962, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus.

President Johnson named Lee to the National Council of Arts in June 1966, and since then she has received numerous honorary doctorates. She continues to live in New York and Monroeville but prefers a relatively private existence, granting few interviews and giving few speeches. She has published only a few short essays since her debut: "Love--In Other Words" in Vogue , 1961; "Christmas to Me" in McCall's , 1961; and "When Children Discover America" in McCall's , 1965.

Lee died on February 19, 2016.

Study Guides on Works by Harper Lee

Go set a watchman harper lee.

Go Set a Watchman is Harper Lee's second published novel, after her award-winning To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. Although there are some striking differences between Lee's two novels in terms of style and content, the continuity...

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To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird during a very tense time racially in her home state of Alabama. The South was still segregated, forcing blacks to use separate facilities apart from those used by whites, in almost every aspect of society....

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Biography and Legacy of Nelle Harper Lee

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Harper Lee Biography

Author of the bestseller-turned-Oscar-winning film To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), she won a Pulitzer for the novel in 1961. The story includes many of her childhood experiences with her brother and her childhood friend Truman Capote, and has become a recognized classic. In 1962, it was made into a film starring Gregory Peck , who won an Oscar for his portrayal of the defense lawyer Atticus Finch, and featured Robert Duvall in one of his first notable parts.

Here are the facts and trivia that people are buzzing about.

To Kill A Mockingbird: A Resource Guide: Harper Lee

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Harper Lee Image

​Nelle  Harper Lee , known by her pen name Harper Lee, was an American novelist.  Lee published two novels in the span of her lifetime, the critically acclaimed To Kill a Mockingbird  and  Go Set a Watchman , a novel considered to be a first draft of her first novel. Lee was notorious for her reclusive nature, having only given a number of interviews since 1960. She was close friends with American novelist  Truman Capote  and was involved with the interview process for Capote's acclaimed non-fiction novel  In Cold Blood . She passed away in February 2016 at the age of 89.

"To Kill a Mockingbird has influenced the character of our country for the better. It's been a gift to the entire world. As a model of good writing and humane sensibility,  this book will be read and studied forever ," said the President about Harper Lee's work.

Harper Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2007. This image is in the public domain.

On Harper Lee

• Smithsonian Magazine Profile on Harper Lee “My book had a universal theme,” she told the Birmingham Post-Herald in 1962. “It’s not a ‘racial’ novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.”
• Harper Lee Obituary from the New York Times Nelle Harper Lee passed away in her sleep on February 19, 2016 in Monroeville, Alabama where she lived.
• Authors, Teachers and Lawyers React to Harper Lee's Passing Lee's lasting legacy had an impact on many professions as many individuals spoke out publicly after she passed.

Library Resources

Nelle Harper Lee's signature circa 1960. This image is in the public domain.

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