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Nelle Harper Lee, a descendent of General
Robert E. Lee, was born in April 1926 in Monroeville Alabama, the
same small town where
Truman Capote spent several years of his childhood.
(Capote and Harper became best of friends as children and remained
close until he died in 1984.)
Harper
is the youngest of four children. She attended Huntingdon College
1944-45, studied law at University of Alabama 1945-49, and studied
at Oxford University for one year. In the 1950s she worked in New
York City as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC.
She gave up this position in order to focus on her writing for one
full year. Around that time, her father became ill and she returned
to Alabama to care for him. She began dividing her time between
New York and Monroeville (she still does).
In 1957 Lee submitted her manuscript for
To
Kill a Mockingbird to the J. B. Lippincott Company. It is well
documented that she was told that her novel consisted of a series of
short stories strung together, and she should re-write it. She took
the criticism seriously spending the next two and half years
re-writing. She hired an editor Tay Hohoff, and in 1960, when she
was 34,
To
Kill a Mockingbird was published. The novel won
her the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and became an international
bestseller and was adapted to film in 1962. An even greater
testament to the novel’s quality is the fact that it has never gone
out of print—an extremely rare honor for novel.
Since then, she has published only four
articles including
Love--In Other Words
in
Vogue, and
Christmas To Me
in McCalls. When
Children Discover America
was published in 1965. She traveled to Kansas with
Truman Capote to
help with research for his bestseller,
In Cold Blood.
In 1966, President Johnson named Lee to the
National Council of Arts. She has received numerous honorary
doctorates, but rarely grants interviews, or gives speeches. When
asked to write an introduction to her novel on its 35th
anniversary, she refused asking that her novel be spared the
introduction, reminding us that the book has never been out of print
and that she is alive. Indeed, she is alive and well, sharing her
time between her home in New York City and Monroeville, Alabama.
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