Harper Lee
Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist whose 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of modern American literature. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood. An earlier draft of Mockingbird, set at a later date, Go Set a Watchman, was published in July 2015 as a sequel. A collection of her short stories and essays, The Land of Sweet Forever, was published on October 21, 2025.
The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbors in Monroeville, Alabama, as well as a childhood event that occurred near her hometown in 1936. The novel deals with racist attitudes and the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s as depicted through the eyes of two children.
Lee received numerous accolades and honorary degrees, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007, which was awarded for her contribution to literature.
Early life
Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of four children of Frances Cunningham and Amasa Coleman Lee. Her parents chose her middle name, Harper, to honor pediatrician Dr. William W. Harper, of Selma, who had saved the life of her sister Louise. Her first name, Nelle, was her grandmother's name spelled backwards and the name she used, whereas Harper Lee was primarily her pen name. Lee's mother was a homemaker; her father was a former newspaper editor, businessman, and lawyer, who also served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1926 to 1938. Through her father, she was related to Confederate General Robert E. Lee and a member of the prominent Lee family. Before A. C. Lee became a title lawyer, he once defended two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Both clients, a father and son, were hanged.Lee's three siblings were Alice Finch Lee, Louise Lee Conner, and Edwin Lee. Although Nelle remained in contact with her significantly older sisters throughout their lives, only her brother was close enough in age to play with, though she bonded with Truman Capote, who visited family in Monroeville during the summers from 1928 until 1934.
While enrolled at Monroe County High School, Lee developed an interest in English literature, in part through her teacher Gladys Watson, who became her mentor. After graduating high school in 1944, like her eldest sister Alice Finch Lee, Nelle attended the then all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery for a year, then transferred to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she studied law for several years. Nelle also wrote for the university newspaper and a humor magazine, but to her father's great disappointment, she left one semester short of completing the credit hours for a degree. In the summer of 1948, Lee attended a summer school program, "European Civilisation in the Twentieth Century", at Oxford University in England, financed by her father, who hoped—in vain, as it turned out—that the experience would make her more interested in her legal studies in Tuscaloosa.
''To Kill a Mockingbird''
In 1949, Lee moved to New York City and took jobs—first at a bookstore, then as an airline reservation agent—while writing in her spare time. After publishing several long stories, Lee found an agent in November 1956; Maurice Crain would become a friend until his death decades later. The following month, at Michael Brown's East 50th Street townhouse, friends gave Lee 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."Origin
In the spring of 1957, a 31-year-old Lee delivered the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman to Crain to send out to publishers, including the now-defunct J. B. Lippincott Company, which eventually bought it. At Lippincott, the novel fell into the hands of Tay Hohoff. Hohoff was impressed. "he spark of the true writer flashed in every line", she would later recount in a corporate history of Lippincott. But as Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. It was, as she described it, "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel". During the next couple of years, she led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled To Kill a Mockingbird.Like many unpublished authors, Lee was unsure of her talents. "I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told," Lee said in a statement in 2015 about the evolution from Watchman to Mockingbird. Hohoff later described the process in Lippincott's corporate history: "After a couple of false starts, the story-line, interplay of characters, and fall of emphasis grew clearer, and with each revision—there were many minor changes as the story grew in strength and in her own vision of it—the true stature of the novel became evident." Hohoff described the give and take between author and editor: "When she disagreed with a suggestion, we talked it out, sometimes for hours"... "And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of country." One winter night, as Charles J. Shields recounts in Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, Lee threw her manuscript out her window and into the snow, before calling Hohoff in tears. Shields recollected that "Tay told her to march outside immediately and pick up the pages".
When the novel was finally ready, the author opted to use the name "Harper Lee" rather than risk having her first name Nelle be misidentified as "Nellie".
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 40 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll by the Library Journal.
Autobiographical details in the novel
Like Lee, the tomboy Scout in the novel is the daughter of a respected small-town Alabama attorney. Scout's friend, Dill Harris, was inspired by Lee's childhood friend and neighbor, Truman Capote; Lee, in turn, is the model for a character in Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948. Although the plot of Lee's novel involves an unsuccessful legal defense similar to one undertaken by her attorney father, the 1931 landmark Scottsboro Boys interracial rape case may also have helped to shape Lee's social conscience.While Lee herself downplayed autobiographical parallels in the book, Truman Capote, mentioning the character Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, described details he considered autobiographical: "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."
After ''To Kill a Mockingbird''
Middle years
For 40 years, Lee lived part-time at 433 East 82nd Street in Manhattan, near her childhood friend Capote. His first novel, the semi-autobiographical Other Voices, Other Rooms, had been published in 1948; a decade later Capote published Breakfast at Tiffany's, which became a film, a musical, and two stage plays. As the To Kill a Mockingbird manuscript went into publication production in 1959, Lee accompanied Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to help him research what they thought would be an article on a small town's response to the murder of a farmer and his family. Capote would expand the material into his best-selling book, In Cold Blood, serialized beginning in September 1965 and published in 1966. Her friendship with Capote, however, would suffer and peter out eventually in the wake of the worldwide success of Lee's novel, which Capote had troubles coming to terms with.After To Kill a Mockingbird was released, Lee began a whirlwind of publicity tours, which she found difficult given her penchant for privacy and many interviewers' characterization of the work as a "coming-of-age story". Racial tensions in the South had increased prior to the book's release. Students at North Carolina A&T University staged the first sit-in months before publication. As the book became a best seller, Freedom Riders arrived in Alabama and were beaten in Anniston and Birmingham. Meanwhile, To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1961 Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews and became a Reader's Digest Book Club condensed selection and an alternate Book of the Month Club selection.
Lee helped with the adaptation of the book to the 1962 Academy Award–winning screenplay by Horton Foote, and said: "I think it is one of the best translations of a book to film ever made." Gregory Peck won an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, the father of the novel's narrator, Scout. The families became close; Peck's grandson, Harper Peck Voll, is named after her.
From the time of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird until her death in 2016, Lee granted almost no requests for interviews or public appearances and, with the exception of a few short essays, published nothing further until 2015. She worked on a follow-up novel—The Long Goodbye—but eventually filed it away unfinished.
Lee assumed significant care responsibilities for her aging father, who was thrilled with her success, and who even began signing autographs as "Atticus Finch". His health worsened and he died in Alabama on April 15, 1962. Lee decided to spend more time in New York City as she mourned. Over the decades, her friend Capote had adopted a decadent lifestyle, which contrasted with Lee's preference for a quiet, more anonymous existence. Lee preferred to visit friends at their homes, and also made unannounced appearances at libraries or other gatherings, particularly in Monroeville.
In January 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Lee to the National Council on the Arts.
Lee also realized that her book had become controversial, particularly with segregationists and other opponents of the civil rights movement. In 1966, Lee wrote a letter to the editor in response to the attempts of a Richmond, Virginia, area school board to ban To Kill a Mockingbird as "immoral literature":
James J. Kilpatrick, editor of The Richmond News Leader, started the Beadle Bumble fund to pay fines for victims of what he termed "despots on the bench". He built the fund using contributions from readers and later used it to defend books as well as people. After the board in Richmond ordered schools to dispose of all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird, Kilpatrick wrote, "A more moral novel scarcely could be imagined." In the name of the Beadle Bumble fund, he then offered free copies to children who wrote in, and by the end of the first week, he had given away 81 copies.
Beginning in 1978, with her sisters' encouragement, Lee returned to Alabama and began a book about an Alabama serial murderer and the trial of his killer in Alexander City, under the working title The Reverend, but also put it aside when she was not satisfied.
When Lee attended the 1983 Alabama History and Heritage Festival in Eufaula, Alabama, as her sister had arranged, she presented the essay "Romance and High Adventure".