Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist best known for her 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. It won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature. Lee only published two books, yet she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 for her contribution to literature. The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936 when she was 10. The novel deals with the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as depicted through the eyes of two children. It was inspired by racist attitudes in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Harper Lee is the daughter of Amasa Coleman Lee, a lawyer who was by all accounts apparently rather like the hero-father of her novel in his sound citizenship and warmheartedness. The plot of To Kill a Mockingbird is based in part on his unsuccessful youthful defense of two African American men convicted of murder. Lee studied law at the University of Alabama (spending a summer as an exchange student at Oxford) but left for New York City without earning a degree. In New York she worked as an airline reservationist but soon received financial aid from friends that allowed her to write full-time. With the help of an editor, she transformed a series of short stories into To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel is told predominately from the perspective of a young girl, Jean Louise (“Scout”) Finch (who ages from six to nine years old during the course of the novel), the daughter of white lawyer Atticus Finch, and occasionally from the retrospective adult voice of Jean Louise. Scout and her brother, Jem, learn the principles of racial justice and open-mindedness from their father, whose just and compassionate acts include an unpopular defense of a black man falsely accused of raping a white girl. They also develop the courage and the strength to follow their convictions in their acquaintance and eventual friendship with a recluse, “Boo” Radley, who has been demonized by the community. To Kill a Mockingbird received a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. Criticism of its tendency to sermonize has been matched by praise of its insight and stylistic effectiveness. It became a memorable film in 1962 and was filmed again in 1997. A Broadway play, adapted by Aaron Sorkin, appeared in 2018. One character from the novel, Charles Baker (“Dill”) Harris, is based on Lee’s childhood friend and next door neighbour in Monroeville, Alabama, Truman Capote. When Capote traveled to Kansas in 1959 to cover the murders of the Clutter family for The New Yorker, Lee accompanied him as what he called his “assistant researchist.” She spent months with Capote interviewing townspeople, writing voluminous notes, sharing impressions, and later returning to Kansas for the trial of the accused—contributions Capote would later use in the composition of In Cold Blood. After the phenomenal success that followed the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, some suspected that Capote was the actual author of Lee’s work, a rumour put to rest when in 2006 a 1959 letter from Capote to his aunt was found, stating that he had read and liked the draft of To Kill a Mockingbird that Lee had shown him but making no mention of any role in writing it. After a few years in New York, Lee divided her time between that city and her hometown, eventually settling back in Monroeville, Alabama. She also wrote a few short essays, including “Romance and High Adventure” (1983), devoted to Alabama history. Go Set a Watchman, written before To Kill a Mockingbird but essentially a sequel featuring Scout as a grown woman who returns to her childhood home in Alabama to visit her father, was released in 2015.

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