Harper Lee

Harper Lee's Backstory

Early life

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest child of A.C. Lee, a lawyer who had edited a newspaper and served in the state legislature, and Frances Finch Lee.¹⁴ Truman Capote spent his childhood summers in Monroeville from 1928 to 1934, and the two became friends.¹

Law school and New York

After Monroe County High School she spent a year at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, then studied law at the University of Alabama, leaving a semester short of a degree; in the summer of 1948 she attended an Oxford University summer program.¹ In 1949 she moved to New York City, where she worked in a bookstore and then as an airline reservations clerk.¹³

The novel

In December 1956 friends gave her a year’s wages as a Christmas present so she could write full time.¹⁴ In the spring of 1957 she delivered a manuscript called Go Set a Watchman to her agent; J. B. Lippincott bought it, and her editor, Tay Hohoff, guided her through the revisions that turned it into To Kill a Mockingbird.¹ The novel was published on July 11, 1960, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.¹³ The 1962 film starred Gregory Peck, who won an Academy Award as Atticus Finch.¹

In Cold Blood

In 1959 she went with Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, as his research assistant on the murders of a farm family, reporting that became his book In Cold Blood.¹³

Later years

She published two short pieces in magazines in 1961 and rarely appeared in public afterward.³⁴ After a stroke in 2007 she returned to Monroeville; that year President George W. Bush gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2010 she received the National Medal of Arts.⁴¹ Go Set a Watchman, the earlier, unrevised version of her novel, was published on July 14, 2015.³⁴ She died in Monroeville on February 19, 2016, at 89.¹

After her death

In 2025 HarperCollins published The Land of Sweet Forever, which collects stories she wrote in the 1950s, found in her New York apartment after her death, along with essays and pieces published between 1961 and 2006.²