"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 finishing public school in Monroeville, she attended Huntington College, a private school for women in Montgomery, for a year and then transferred 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 ten languages. Critical reviews of the novel were mixed; it was only after the success of the film adaptation 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. Lee worked as a consultant on the screenplay adaptation of the novel. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. 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.
Author Truman Capote was Lee's next-door neighbor from 1928 to 1933. In 1959 Lee and Capote traveled to Garden City, Kansas, to research the Clutter family murders for his work, In Cold Blood (1965). Capote dedicated In Cold Blood to Lee and to his partner, Jack Dunphy. Lee was the inspiration for the character Idabel in Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote in turn clearly influenced the development of the character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Harper Lee divides her time between New York and her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, 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 Scout Finch, her young narrator in To Kill a Mockingbird.
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| She grew up in the 1930s in a rural southern Alabama town. | She grew up in the 1930s in a rural southern Alabama town. | |
| Her father, Amasa Lee, was an attorney who served in the state legislature in Alabama. | Her father, Atticus Finch, is an attorney who serves in the state legislature in Alabama. | |
| Her older brother and young neighbor (Truman Capote) were playmates. | Her older brother (Jem) and young neighbor (Dill) are playmates. | |
| Harper Lee was an avid reader as a child. | Scout reads before she enters school and reads the Mobile Register newspaper in the first grade. | |
| She was six years old when the Scottsboro trials were widely covered in national, state and local newspapers. | She is six years old when the trial of Tom Robinson takes place. |
