Lee, Harper (1926—)

American author of the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird, which presented a loving, yet uncompromising, portrait of the morality of the American South where whites ruled by oppressing blacks. Name variations: Nelle. Born Nelle Harper Lee on April 28, 1926, in the small town of Monroeville in southwestern Alabama; daughter of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances (Finch) Lee; educated in the public schools; attended Huntingdon College, 1944–45; studied law at the University of Alabama, 1945–49; studied one year at Oxford University; never married; no children.

Awards:

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Alabama Library Association award, Brotherhood Award of National Conference of Christians and Jews, first in "The Best of the Year" list in The New York Times Book Review (all 1961), and Bestsellers' Paperback of the Year award (1962), all for To Kill A Mockingbird.

Grew up in Monroeville, broke off her legal studies and moved to New York to become a writer; worked as airline reservations clerk with Eastern Airlines and British Overseas Airlines (1950s), quit job to devote full time to writing; returned to Alabama to help nurse her ailing father and wrote short stories that became To Kill A Mockingbird, which was published to universal acclaim (1960).

As a child, Nelle Harper Lee had short cropped hair, wore coveralls, went barefoot, and "could talk mean like a boy," in the words of her Monroeville neighbor Marianne Moates . She could also beat up boys her own age, including her dear friend Truman Capote who spent summers next door. Nelle, named after her maternal grandmother Ellen, and nicknamed "Dody," was the third daughter in her family. The first born, a boy, had died in infancy.

Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was born in Georgiana, Alabama, in 1880. In 1913, he came to Monroeville as a legal apprentice, was later admitted to the bar, and in 1916 became a partner with the firm of Barnett and Bugg. From 1929 to 1947, he was editor of the local weekly Monroeville Journal. A relative of Capote's recalled Amasa Lee, who was the prototype for To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch: "He was a tall, angular man, detached, not particularly friendly, especially with children. In fact, most of us kids were quite intimidated by him and his rather formal ways. He was not the sort of father who came up to his children, ruffled their hair, and made jokes for their amusement."

Nelle's mother was an accomplished pianist who delegated domestic responsibilities to Haddy, their live-in African-American housekeeper. Frances Finch Lee was heavy-set, but carried herself with considerable grace and wore her platinum-blonde hair in two thick braids that she coiled on top of her head. She sat on her front porch doing crossword puzzles as quickly as she could move her pencil, but her mind was not always clear. She frequently wandered up and down the street saying strange things to neighbors and twice tried to drown Nelle, who was saved by one of her sisters.

The Lee home was a white, one-story house with a porch that went the length of the front. The house was comfortable but sparsely furnished with wooden chairs, iron bedsteads, and bare floors of highly polished pine. Fig trees, crape myrtles, and pecan trees grew in the yard. A hedge separated the Lee home from that of the Faulks, three middle-aged sisters and their taciturn elder brother who each summer played host to their young cousin Truman Capote. As Lee was too rough to play with little girls, and Capote was too soft for the town's boys, the two became best friends and used to slip through the gaps in the hedge to visit each other. They sat up in her treehouse in a chinaberry tree and read about Tarzan, Tom Swift, and the Rover Boys, and later Sherlock Holmes. Capote told writer Lawrence Groble that instead of going to movies, they would go to the courthouse and watch her father try cases. Lee herself recalled going upstairs to watch her father from the balcony, unless the "colored" people were attending a trial because that was usually the seating area assigned to them.

She and Capote were gifted children in a small unpaved town that prized conformity. When Truman demonstrated that he knew how to read in kindergarten, the teacher hit his hand with a ruler. Nelle would reassure him by saying, "It's alright, Truman, that you know everything, even if the teachers don't understand." She would later describe the dilemma of an educated child in a poor country school in To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee herself began writing stories at the age of seven, but never with an idea of publishing. Capote, meanwhile, was observing those around him and storing anecdotes for future tales. He told Groble that his first published story, "Mrs. Busybody," was based on Nelle's mother; his source was so obvious that it upset the town when it was published in the Mobile Register.

Harper Lee would later say of her childhood, "I was lonely because I didn't fit into anyone else's pattern and nothing can be more excruciating than that kind of loneliness. I had a robust childhood and, as I remember, a vigorous one. It was a childhood of terrible unhappiness, but it was not specifically unhappy. I suppose it was more or less normal, at least I found sufficient entertainment to fill each day."

She went to Huntingdon College in Monroeville, attended Oxford University for a year, then studied law at the University of Alabama, but broke off her studies in 1950 a few months before completing them to go to New York to become a writer. Capote had burst on the literary scene there in 1947 with his Other Voices, Other Rooms, the lyrical novel of a boy who accepts his homosexuality. Lee had helped inspire Idabel, the tomboy-ish girl in the book.

In New York, she sublet Capote's apartment and worked first as a book saleswoman, then as a flight reservations clerk for Eastern Airlines, because it had direct service to Alabama, and then for BOAC. The jobs financed a long and dedicated apprenticeship that consisted of writing for four hours each night, reading her work and discarding what she wrote. She realized that her aborted law studies had taught her to be clear and brief. The law also gave her story ideas. "You would be amazed at the depravity of human nature," she later told an interviewer for the New York Herald-Tribune.

Lee remained close to Capote, who was a darling of the literary and social world during the 1950s, and his friends became close to her as well. One Christmas, composer Mike Brown jotted down a promise, wrapped it in a red ribbon, and gave it to her as a present: "Miss Nelle Harper Lee gets enough time off to read and write whenever she wants to." He provided monthly loans of $100 so that Lee could quit her job and write full time. Aside from writing, she filled her days collecting memoirs of 19th-century clerics and pursuing interests such as golf, crime, and music.

Soon afterward, her widowed father, who was in his late 70s, suffered a series of heart attacks. Lee returned to Atlanta to look after Amasa Lee by day while her sister Alice Lee , a tax attorney, was at work. In the evenings, Lee went to the law office to write. Such behavior was hard for others to understand. "My aunt told me I was the laziest girl she had ever seen," Lee said when the book came out. "All I did was sit around and concentrate." The night she wrote a scene about an evil man chasing kids, she scared herself so badly that she ran all the way home.

On weekends, Lee mentally planned her writing on the golf course. She played regularly enough to score in the high 80s. "In Monroeville they're Southern people and if they know you are working at home, they think nothing of walking right in for coffee," she explained. "Your schedule is absolutely enforced by others. You just can't tell people you're busy working because they don't think writing is work…. But they wouldn't dream of interrupting you on the golf course."

As far as a sense of happiness is concerned, I was never happier than when I was writing the book.

—Harper Lee

During this time in Monroeville, she wrote three essays and a short story about an angry old woman who guarded her camellias from children, which later became a chapter in Mockingbird. She submitted the work to the agent Maurice Crain. Crain advised her to write a novel based on the story of the children and their father. "Until then," she said, "I thought I had done a story that was a slap-bang portrayal of a perfectly horrid old lady." She quickly drafted half of a novel, which Crain sold to J.B. Lippincott. "As far as a sense of happiness is concerned, I was never happier than when I was writing the book. I think the thing I've always wanted was to be by myself," Lee said. She drafted the manuscript three times before she was satisfied.

While awaiting publication, she traveled by train with Capote to Kansas, where he was researching the unsolved murder of the Clutter family for The New Yorker magazine. While the crime they investigated was serious, their work had an aspect of the Rover Boys adventures and Sherlock Holmes stories they had savored in their childhood. Lee's help was crucial, because in the beginning she fit in much better with the local people than the short, plump Capote, who spoke in a high-pitched voice and giggled. Lee was 34, solidly built, and looked like her father, with his square, angular face. She had a strong, thin mouth, dark eyes, heavy eyebrows and black hair, which she wore short. "Nelle walked into the kitchen and five minutes later I felt I had known her for a long time," said a columnist for the local paper in Kansas.

Neither Lee nor Capote took notes during the interviews so that people would speak to them more spontaneously, as if they were having intimate conversations. But afterward, they hurried to their hotel rooms to write down their recollections. The two then compared what they had learned so that the story would be accurate. Still, in order to get the facts straight, they once interviewed the same person three times in one day. Capote's article became the nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, which was published in January 1966 and established him as an authority on the criminal justice system.

By that time, Lee was famous in her own right. When To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, it hit with stunning force. Mockingbird is two entwined stories. The first is of childhood adventures and brushes with danger, and features Scout, Jem, and Dill, a character based on Capote. The second, greater tale is of a black man falsely accused and convicted of rape. Mockingbird is a loving, candid portrait of the South. The book is set in 1935, yet its message was still true in 1960, a century after the Civil War: the black man had remained the slave of the white man's whims. In many ways, the novel continues to be significantly relevant.

Mockingbird was at the top of the bestseller list for 40 weeks, offered by four major book clubs. It was published in ten languages and went through a dozen printings. Reviewers were universally respectful and enthusiastic. The Vogue reviewer wrote, "Funny, happy and written with unspectacular precision, To Kill a Mockingbird is about conscience—how it is instilled in two children, Scout and Jem Finch; how it operates in their father, Atticus, a lawyer appointed to defend a Negro on a rape charge; and how conscience grows in their small Alabama town." Time observed, "Novelist Lee's prose has an edge that cuts through cant, and she teaches the reader an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life."

The novel was published as the civil-rights movement exploded across the South and became part of the national zeitgeist (spirit). Blacks were staging sit-ins demanding to be served at Southern lunch counters. "All I want is to come in and place my order and be served and leave a tip if I feel like it," said a black college graduate in Charlotte, N.C. In Montgomery, Alabama, a thousand black students gathered on the steps of the former Confederate Capitol building to protest segregation. By 1963, when the movie version of Mockingbird came out and Gregory Peck won the Academy Award for best actor, blacks and whites from the North were dying, some with the collusion of white Southern sheriffs, in attempts to register blacks to vote in the South.

Most of her neighbors in Monroeville were proud of Lee's achievement and were happy when reporters and filmmakers came to town to write about them. In May 1961, when Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Alabama state legislature attempted to pass a resolution praising her, the daughter of a former state representative, for her achievement. It was blocked, however, by state senator E.O. Eddins who a few years earlier had managed to have a children's book banned from state libraries because in it a white rabbit married a black rabbit. The Montgomery Advertiser noted he had bagged "one black rabbit and one mockingbird."

Lee spent the first year after publication observing the filming of Mockingbird and caring for her father, who would die in 1963. But as early as May 1961, she told a reporter that she was thinking through her second novel. Lee said she would set it in the South because it was the last refuge of genuine eccentrics who have had time and room to develop their own individuality. "I don't mean that in a Gothic sense. They are very pleasant," she told Harriet Stix of the New York Herald Tribune. But work on a second novel did not go well. "I'm in a perpetual state of stuckness," she said in May 1964, four years after publication of Mockingbird. "I'll be so glad when it's over."

She admitted that at one point she threw the manuscript through the window of her second-floor workroom, then ran downstairs and gathered up the pages. She worked full days on the book, rewriting and discarding what she'd written, completing two pages a day. She finished a draft and expected to have a new novel out in 1965, but the book never came to light. She avoided the celebrity life that took up increasing amounts of Truman Capote's creative energies, but occasionally lunched with friends of his like the socialite Babe Paley . When writers for People Weekly interviewed Capote in 1976 about the slow progress of his work, they called Lee for comment. "We are bound by a common anguish," she said. Eventually, she stopped giving interviews, but she remained pleased with the success of Mockingbird. She said in 1996, "To my surprise and gratitude, Mockingbird seems to be meaningful to a new generation, one far removed from the miseries of the time it was first published." After Mockingbird, Harper Lee never published again.

sources:

Contemporary Authors. Vol. 13–16. Detroit, MI: Gale Research.

Clarke, Gerald. Capote: A Biography. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Grobel, Lawrence. Conversations with Capote. NY: New American Library, 1985.

Moates, Marianne M. A Bridge of Childhood. NY: Henry Holt, 1989.

New York Herald Tribune. May 3 and May 24, 1961.

New York Post. November 2, 1960.

Paine, Albert Bigelow. Life and Lillian Gish. NY: Macmillan, 1932.

People Weekly. May 10, 1976.

Rudisill, Marie, with James C. Simmons. Capote. NY: William Morrow, 1983

related media:

To Kill a Mockingbird (129 min. film), starring Gregory Peck, Brock Peters, Mary Badham , Phillip Alford, Robert Duvall, and John Megna, directed by Robert Mulligan, screenplay by Horton Foote, based on the novel by Harper Lee, produced by Alan Pakula, 1962 (won Academy Awards for Best Screenplay for Foote and Best Actor for Peck).

Kathleen Brady , author of Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball (Hyperion) and Ida Tarbell: Portrait of A Muckraker (University of Pittsburgh Press)