Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird
Nelle Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. She attended college to study law
(her father practiced law), but never completed a degree. In 1949 she moved to New York City and
took a job as an airline reservation agent while she worked on her craft as a writer. She was
befriended by composer and lyricist Michael Brown and his wife Joy who gave her a Christmas present
of enough money to live on for a year and so that she could devote herself to writing.
Her novel To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. The following year it won the Pulitzer
Prize. Mockingbird was made into an Academy Award-winning movie in 1962, and the book has
become a much-read classic. Its themes of prejudice, small town life, childhood and parenting,
injustice, seeing others' perspectives, and courage continue to resonate today.
Lee is also known for her friendship with Truman Capote, a childhood friend and supposedly
the model for Mockingbird's Dill. In 1959 she accompanied Capote on a research trip prior to his
writing his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood.
Lee wrote a few magazine articles in the 1960's but never, to anyone's knowledge, wrote a
subsequent novel. However, in 2014 Lee's lawyer came across a manuscript in Lee's safe-deposit box,
read it, and passed it on to Lee's agent. Lee has said that she did not know the manuscript still
existed. The novel, Go Set a Watchman, was written before To Kill a Mockingbird and has some of the
same characters but is set twenty years later with Scout as an adult narrator.
Some controversy has surrounded the publication of the second novel concerning its craft, its
back story, and its portrayal of Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lee, now 89, continues to live quietly in Monroeville. She prefers a private life and does not
give interviews or make public speaking appearances.