 “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. (Compare
her childhood with Scout's childhood.) After
she attended Monroeville public schools, she attended
Huntingdon College, a private school for women in
Montgomery for a year and then transferred to the
University of Alabama. While a student, Lee was well
known on campus as editor of the politically satirical
student newspaper. After graduation, Lee studied
at Oxford University on a Fulbright Scholarship.
She returned to the University of Alabama to study
law but withdrew six months before graduation.
In 1949, she moved to New York 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 of the short stories into a novel. In order to complete this project, 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 Editor Tay Holhoff, Lippincott released To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee’s only published novel.
To Kill a Mockingbird became an instant popular success. A year after the novel was published, 5,000,000 copies had been sold, and it had been translated into ten languages. At the time, critical reviews of the novel were mixed. It was only after the success of the film adaptation in 1962 that many critics reconsidered the novel’s greatness.
Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird during the beginning of the Civil Rights era (from about 1955-1958). At this time, Alabama was very much in the news with the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks’ courage, Emmett Till’s lynching, Martin Luther King’s rise to leadership, and Autherine Lucy’s attempt to attend graduate school at the University of Alabama. The publication of the novel in 1960 coincided with a time of tumultuous events and racial strife as the struggle in the Civil Rights movement grew violent and spread into cities across America. The novel climbed to the top of the New York Times Best Seller’s List as it began to make it remarkable impact on the conscience of a divided nation.
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 his partner Jack Dunphy. Lee was the inspiration for the character Idabel in Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). In turn, he clearly influenced her character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Harper Lee lives in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Though she has published no other work of fiction, To Kill a Mockingbird continues to have a strong impact on successive generations of readers worldwide.
Harper Lee had many childhood experiences that are similar to those of her young narrator in To Kill a Mockingbird, Jean Louise “Scout” Finch.
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