About+Harper+Lee

 **Harper Lee ** Harper Lee’s real name is Nelle Harper Lee. To some extent To Kill A Mockingbird was based on Nelle’s real life. She was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. The novel’s setting is Maycomb, Alabama, a small Southern town like Monroeville.

Her parents played an important part in her life and subsequently, her writing. Her mother, Francis Cunningham Finch Lee, was a homemaker. Her father A.C. Lee published and edited the town newspaper. His respect for the written word affected Lee’s ideas about the importance of writing. Later, Her father practiced law. He once defended two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Both of his clients, a father and a son, were hanged. Her father’s unsuccessful defense of the two black men, in addition to a famous a notorious interracial rape case called the Scottsboro Boys trial, helped to shape her sense of drama and interest in social justice.

As a child, Harper Lee was an unruly tomboy. She fought on the playground. She talked back to teachers. She was bored with school and resisted any sort of conformity. The character Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird would have liked her. In high school, Lee was fortunate to have a gifted English teacher, Gladys Watson Burkett, who introduced her to challenging literature and the rigors of writing well. Le once said that her ambition was to become like Jane Austen, a famous English writer.

When she went to the University of Alabama, Lee joined a sorority but she didn’t feel like she fit in. She found a second home on the campus newspaper, Eventually she became editor-in-chief of a quarterly humor magazine on campus. She entered the law school, but she “loathed” it, Despite her fathers hopes that she would become a local attorney like her sister Alice, Lee went to New York to pursue her writing.

She spent eight years working odd jobs before she finally showed a manuscript to an editor at a publishing company. At this point, the piece still resembled a string of stories more than a novel. Her editor guided her rewriting for two and a half years. One winter night in 1958, as Nelle Harper Lee huddled in her New York apartment trying to finesse her unruly, episodic manuscript into some semblance of a cohesive novel. All but drowning in many drafts of the same material, Lee suddenly threw open a window and threw five years of work onto the dirty snow below. She then called her editor told her to go outside and collect the pieces of her novel from the slush.

When //To Kill A Mockingbird// was published in 1960 she used the pen-name Harper Lee because she was afraid that people would call her Nellie. Four national mail-order book clubs had selected it for their readers before it was published. It got highly favorable reviews and quickly climbed the bestseller lists, where it remained for eight-eight weeks. In 1961, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize. The Washington Post said, “A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title //To Kill A Mockingbird//.” Eighty weeks later, the novel still perched on the hardcover bestseller list. During that time, it had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the hearts of American readers. One can’t help wondering how literary history might have been different had Harper Lee left her manuscript in the slush on that winter night.