Harper Lee

American · 1926 to 2016

Born Nelle Harper Lee on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of four children, she was the daughter of Amasa Coleman Lee, a former newspaper editor and lawyer who served in the state legislature, and Frances Cunningham Finch, a homemaker who suffered from a nervous disorder. Her childhood neighbour was Truman Capote, a slight, imaginative boy who visited his Monroeville cousins each summer and became her closest companion. She studied at Huntingdon College, then at the University of Alabama law school, but left a semester short of her degree and moved to New York City in 1949 to work as an airline reservation clerk. In 1956 friends gave her a year's salary as a Christmas gift so she could write full time. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), drawn from the trials her father defended and from the moral weather of her hometown, won the Pulitzer Prize and has sold more than forty million copies in over forty languages. She accompanied Capote to Kansas in 1959 to assist his research for In Cold Blood, conducting interviews and taking the notes that made the book possible. After Mockingbird she retreated almost completely from public life, refusing interviews for half a century, dividing her time between Monroeville and a small apartment in Manhattan. Go Set a Watchman, an earlier draft of Mockingbird discovered in a safe-deposit box, was published in 2015 amid disputes over her consent. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. She died on February 19, 2016, in Monroeville, at the age of eighty-nine, in the same small Alabama town where she had been born.