biography harper lee

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• What is To Kill a Mockingbird about?
• What inspired Harper Lee to write To Kill a Mockingbird ?
• How did people respond to To Kill a Mockingbird ?
• Why is To Kill a Mockingbird a significant text?
• Is there a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird ?

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• Amercian Society of Authors and Writers - Biography of Harper Lee
• Medill Reports Chicago - Harper Lee (1926-2016): between classic and controversy
• NPR - The Measure of Harper Lee: A Life Shaped By A Towering Text
• Monroe County Museum - Harper Lee Timeline
• Literary Devices - Nelle Harper Lee
• Encyclopedia of Alabama - Biography of Harper Lee
• Harper Lee - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Why is Harper Lee significant?

Harper Lee wrote the novel To Kill a Mockingbird , which was published in 1960. Its powerful depiction of racism and prejudice in the American South is widely acclaimed. It has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.

Where did Harper Lee go to school?

Harper Lee studied law at the University of Alabama, but she did not receive a degree. She was also an exchange student at the University of Oxford.

What did Harper Lee write?

Harper Lee’s best-known book is the novel To Kill a Mockingbird , which was published in 1960. She wrote the novel Go Set a Watchman before To Kill a Mockingbird , but it was not published until 2015. She also wrote essays on Alabama history.

What awards did Harper Lee win?

Harper Lee received a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird . She was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.

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This summary was created from our Britannica article using AI. Please verify important information in our full article.

Harper Lee (born April 28, 1926, Monroeville, Alabama, U.S.—died February 19, 2016, Monroeville) was an American writer nationally acclaimed for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).

Harper Lee’s father was Amasa Coleman Lee, a lawyer who by all accounts resembled the hero of her novel in his sound citizenship and warmheartedness. The plot of To Kill a Mockingbird is based in part on his unsuccessful youthful defense of two African American men convicted of murder. Lee studied law at the University of Alabama (spending a summer as an exchange student at the University of Oxford ), but she left for New York City without earning a degree. In New York she worked as an airline reservationist but soon received financial aid from friends that allowed her to write full-time. With the help of an editor, she transformed a series of short stories into To Kill a Mockingbird .

The novel is told predominately from the perspective of a young girl, Jean Louise (“Scout”) Finch (who ages from six to nine years old during the course of the novel), the daughter of white lawyer Atticus Finch , and occasionally from the retrospective adult voice of Jean Louise. Scout and her brother, Jem, learn the principles of racial justice and open-mindedness from their father, whose just and compassionate acts include an unpopular defense of a Black man falsely accused of raping a white girl. They also develop the courage and the strength to follow their convictions in their acquaintance and eventual friendship with a recluse, “Boo” Radley , who has been demonized by the community . To Kill a Mockingbird received a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide. Criticism of its tendency to sermonize has been matched by praise of its insight and stylistic effectiveness. It became a memorable film in 1962 . A Broadway play , adapted by Aaron Sorkin , appeared in 2018.

One character from the novel, Charles Baker (“Dill”) Harris, is based on Lee’s childhood friend and next door neighbour in Monroeville, Alabama, Truman Capote . When Capote traveled to Kansas in 1959 to cover the murders of the Clutter family for The New Yorker , Lee accompanied him as what he called his “assistant researchist.” She spent months with Capote interviewing townspeople, writing voluminous notes, sharing impressions, and later returning to Kansas for the trial of the accused—contributions Capote would later use in the composition of In Cold Blood . After the phenomenal success that followed the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird , some suspected that Capote was the actual author of Lee’s work, a rumour that was proven wrong when in 2006 a 1959 letter from Capote to his aunt was found, stating that he had read and liked the draft of To Kill a Mockingbird that Lee had shown him but making no mention of any role in writing it.

After a few years in New York, Lee divided her time between that city and her hometown, eventually settling back in Monroeville, Alabama. She also wrote a few short essays , including “Romance and High Adventure” (1983), devoted to Alabama history. Go Set a Watchman , written before To Kill a Mockingbird but essentially a sequel featuring Scout as a grown woman who returns to her childhood home in Alabama to visit her father, was released in 2015.

Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.

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Harper Lee Biography

“Nelle” Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. She grew up in Monroeville, a small town in southwest Alabama. Her father was a lawyer who also served in the state legislature from 1926–1938. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader. After she attended public school in Monroeville she attended Huntingdon College, a private school for women in Montgomery for a year and then transferred to the University of Alabama. After graduation, Lee studied at Oxford University. She returned to the University of Alabama to study law but withdrew six months before graduation.

She moved to New York in 1949 and worked as a reservations clerk for Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways. While in New York, she wrote several essays and short stories, but none were published. Her agent encouraged her to develop one short story into a novel. In order to complete it, Lee quit working and was supported by friends who believed in her work. In 1957, she submitted the manuscript to J. B. Lippincott Company. Although editors found the work too episodic, they saw promise in the book and encouraged Lee to rewrite it. In 1960, with the help of Lippincott editor Tay Hohoff, To Kill a Mockingbird was published.

To Kill a Mockingbird became an instant popular success. A year after the novel was published, 500,000 copies had been sold and it had been translated into 10 languages. Critical reviews of the novel were mixed. It was only after the success of the film adaptation in 1962 that many critics reconsidered To Kill a Mockingbird .

To Kill a Mockingbird was honored with many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and was made into a film in 1962 starring Gregory Peck. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It actually was honored with three awards: Gregory Peck won the Best Actor Award, Horton Foote won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar and a design team was awarded an Oscar for Best Art Direction/Set Decoration B/W. Lee worked as a consultant on the screenplay adaptation of the novel.

Author Truman Capote was Lee’s next-door neighbor from 1928 to 1933. In 1959 Lee and Capote traveled to Garden City, Kan., to research the Clutter family murders for his work, In Cold Blood (1965). Capote dedicated In Cold Blood to Lee and his partner Jack Dunphy. Lee was the inspiration for the character Idabel in Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). He in turn clearly influenced her character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird .

Harper Lee divides her time between New York and her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., where her sister Alice Lee practices law. Though she has published no other work of fiction, this novel continues to have a strong impact on successive generations of readers.

Harper Lee had many childhood experiences that are similar to those of her young narrator in To Kill a Mockingbird , Scout Finch:

Harper Lee’s Childhood

• She grew up in the 1930s in a rural southern Alabama town.
• Her father, Amasa Lee, is an attorney who served in the state legislature in Alabama.
• Her older brother and young neighbor (Truman Capote) are playmates.
• Harper Lee is an avid reader as a child.
• She is 6 years old when the Scottsboro trials are widely covered in national, state and local newspapers.

Scout Finch’s Childhood

• Her father, Atticus Finch, is an attorney who served in the state legislature in Alabama.
• Her older brother (Jem) and young neighbor (Dill) are playmates.
• Scout reads before she enters school and reads the Mobile Register newspaper in first grade.
• She is 6 years old when the trial of Tom Robinson takes place.

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Remembering the life and legacy of Harper Lee

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Renowned author Harper Lee, whose debut novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” has become enshrined within the American literary canon, died early Friday morning at age 89. Jeffrey Brown sits down with bestselling novelist Allan Gurganus to discuss Lee’s works and enduring legacy.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

Finally tonight: the loss of a literary legend reclusive in life, but renowned for crafting one of the great American novels.

And to Jeffrey Brown.

JEFFREY BROWN:

Harper Lee was a little known writer living in New York when "To Kill a Mockingbird" was published in 1960. The book would win the Pulitzer Prize a year later, sell more than 30 million copies in 40 languages, and be read and loved by generations.

Its fame grew with the 1962 film version starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, father of the young narrator, Scout, and a lawyer in a segregated Alabama town who defends a black man against a rape charge.

In a 1964 radio interview, Lee said this about "Mockingbird"'s enormous success:

HARPER LEE, Novelist:

My reaction to it wasn't one of surprise. It was one of sheer numbness. It was like being hit over the head and knocked cold.

HARPER LEE:

I never expected that the book would sell in the first place.

But in the decades that followed, Lee did little or no talking. It was news when she went to the White House in 2007 to accept a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Instead, she lived quietly most of her life in the town of Monroeville, Alabama. And while readers waited, no other books came, until the surprise this past summer of "Go Set a Watchman," a book described as written before "Mockingbird," but only discovered and published 55 years later.

It drew more readers, mixed reviews, and many questions about the circumstances of its writing and publication.

Harper Lee died in her sleep last night. She was 89 years old.

And joining us now is novelist and short story writer Allan Gurganus. His books include "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All," "Plays Well With Others," and most recently "Local Souls."

Allan, welcome to you.

What explains the popularity in the end of "To Kill a Mockingbird"?

ALLAN GURGANUS, Novelist:

I think it's a fable about the extraordinarily difficult subject of race that presents itself with charm and a kind of innocence that makes the investigation acceptable and beguiling.

I think the name Scout of the child is appropriate. She's our representative in this strange moral morass that she finds herself in. And I think she's spoken to a lot of people over the years.

And set in its particular time, when you think of both the historical qualities and for you, as a writer, its writing qualities.

ALLAN GURGANUS:

It's a book with a lot of precision, a lot of poetic passages about small-town life that rings completely true, as somebody who grew up in a small town.

But I think, ethically, the questions are strenuous and difficult and interesting. And that combination of giving us candy and salt at the same time has made the book so popular. It's also short, which is great for junior high school readers.

But it manages to pull heartstrings and ask big, big questions.

Not to be underemphasized, the length of a book sometimes, right?

What about Harper Lee the author?

No, and especially for young people.

What about Harper Lee the author and the sort of — the mythology of the — that came to surround her as writing this one book, all but disappearing, people waiting endlessly for another book?

I think she was a very shy, charming person used to living in a very small town, where everybody knew her, and the attention that she got when this novel came out and became a bestseller for 88 weeks was overwhelming.

She was also protecting her private life, her sexual life, which is a decision that I respect. And she just made a decision not to go public. I think the pressure of following a book that wins the Pulitzer Prize can't be overestimated.

And she was — I think had set out to write a book that mythologized her father, her actual lawyer father, in a way that met her own standards. He still spoke to her after she had written the book. And she was pleased with what she had done. And I think her mission was in some ways complete.

And then, of course, there's the "Go Set a Watchman," a very strange episode, many questions that came about, whether it was an early draft of "Mockingbird," whether she had agreed or should have agreed to its publication.

What, in the end, do you think that we should take from that?

I think every writer has two or three novels hidden away in drawers and closets that would ruin their literary reputation.

And for somebody to come in late in your game and public those with only half of your permission may be a smart move in terms of moneymaking, but it was a devastating blow to her reputation.

A lot of boys had been named Atticus, and people actually went to court to have their sons named changed when the Atticus in the second book turned out to be a conventional racist like the other people on the town council. So I think it was a mistake for her reputation.

But the singular book that she will be remembered for is the "Mockingbird."

(CROSSTALK)

Yes. I was going to say, so, briefly, the legacy really, you just think, should be defined by one this book, but what a book it was.

What a book it was.

And to think that it came out in 1960, just before the huge riots and the German shepherds and the fire hoses in the South, I think it taught white America how to think about race. And we needed an innocent child to lead us into that difficult and complex subject.

And it made the prophecy of what was coming palatable and easy to understand and digest. So, it served an extraordinary function, and it's to be remembered and treasured, I think.

Allan Gurganus on the life and work of Harper Lee, thank you so much.

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Literary Ladies Guide

An archive dedicated to classic women authors and their work, harper lee, author of to kill a mockingbird, by nava atlas | on may 31, 2018 | updated january 29, 2024 | comments (1).

Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 –February 19, 2016) was an American author best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).

Born in Monroeville, Alabama, she was originally named Nelle Harper Lee.

Few novels have had the cultural impact of To Kill a Mockingbird, which has sold tens of millions of copies and has been translated into more than forty languages. Lee drew from her upbringing in a small southern town to tell an indelible American story.

Early years and education

Lee was the youngest of four children — two sisters and a brother. Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was a lawyer and member of the Alabama state legislature. Her mother, Frances Finch, rarely left the house; it’s now believed that she suffered from untreated bipolar disorder.

Truman Capote (then named Truman Persons) was a childhood friend and the inspiration for Dill, the eccentric neighbor boy in Mockingbird . Truman lived with his mother’s relatives in Monroeville after being virtually abandoned by his own parents.

Lee enjoyed writing throughout her childhood and developed an interest in English literature in high school. Her college studies began in 1944 at the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama. Ever the tomboy, Lee didn’t share her classmates’ interest in dating and fashion, staying focused on her studies.

After transferring to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, Lee began writing for the college newspaper as well as its humor publication, the Rammer Jammer. She eventually became the editor of the latter.

Lee was accepted into the university’s law school in her junior year, which gave students the opportunity to begin studies toward a law degree while still undergraduates. But following her first year in the program, she announced to her family that she felt that writing, not law, was her true calling.

. . . . . . . . . .

• 10 Facts About Harper Lee

Photo of Harper Lee by Truman Capote (1960), from the dust jacket of To Kill a Mockingbird.  Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Becoming a New Yorker

In 1949, 23-year-old Lee moved to New York City. She worked as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines and for British Overseas Air Corp (BOAC). She reconnected with her old pal Truman Capote, who was finding his place in the literary world.

It would be her friendship with the Broadway composer-lyricist Michael Martin Brown and his wife Joy that would change her life.

Michael and Joy Brown became Lee’s angels: For Christmas 1956, they offered to support her for an entire year so that she could quit her day jobs and write full time. The Browns also helped her get a literary agent, who got an editor at J.B. Lippincott Company to acquire her manuscript.

The story, set in a small Alabama town, would slowly and painstakingly take shape to become To Kill a Mockingbird. Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, the story’s main character, was a tomboyish yet sensitive girl who had much in common with the young Nelle Harper Lee.

Work With Truman Capote

Once her manuscript was finally completed, Lee worked as a research assistant for Truman Capote for an article he was writing for The New Yorker . The sensational murder of four members of the Clutter family in a small Kansas farming community would eventually become the groundbreaking “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood .

Lee was disappointed by the lack of acknowledgment she received from Capote for her role in researching and assistance on In Cold Blood , and it caused a rift between them. Their estrangement deepened as Capote drifted deeper into drug culture.

To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in June of 1960 to instant acclaim and success. A coming-of-age story set in Maycomb, small Southern town, it’s told from the perspective of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, is an attorney with integrity and wisdom to spare.

Scout and her older brother Jem are being raised by Atticus, a widower, and Calpurnia, their African-American housekeeper. Dill (the character inspired by Truman Capote) comes to town during the summers to stay with his aunt. He, Scout, and Jem plot ways to lure their mysterious neighbor, Arthur “Boo” Radley, out of his house so they can get a look at him.

One of the central aspects of the story is Atticus’s legal representation of a black man, Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a white woman. She and her father Bob Ewell, are considered the town’s “white trash.”

The children learn that even plenty of proof that Tom is innocent isn’t enough for the all-white jury. Scout’s eyes are opened to the complexity of human nature, and its capacity for good and evil.

To Kill a Mockingbird was a popular as well as a critical success, lauded for capturing the complex social fabric of Southern life and examining unsettling issues of race and class in America. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, the book won numerous other awards and was a selection of a number of book clubs.

The book made Harper Lee famous and also quite wealthy, though it didn’t change much about her frugal lifestyle. She shared a modest home with her oldest sister Alice, an attorney who oversaw many of Lee’s legal and financial affairs. She spent little on herself and generously donated to various charities and to the local Methodist church.

No one was more surprised by the incredible success of To Kill a Mockingbird than the author herself. In a 1964 interview, she said:

“I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I didn’t expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”

Quotes from to Kill a Mockingbird . . . . . . . . . .

Film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird

The 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird cemented the novel’s reputation and success. With Gregory Peck as Atticus and two children from Alabama — Mary Badham and Phillip Alford — as Scout and Jem, the film was completely true to the spirit of the novel. Peck won an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Harper Lee originally wanted the role of Atticus Finch to go to Spencer Tracy, even writing him a letter to ask that he star in the film. He was unavailable, but as it turned out, there couldn’t have been a more fitting actor to portray Atticus than Gregory Peck. Lee came to came to adore him, and the two remained friends until Peck’s death in 2003.

Later Years

By the 1970s Harper Lee seemed to have had enough of public life. She retreated from view, gave few interviews, and divided her time between New York City and Monroeville.

In 2007 Harper Lee had a stroke and was dealing with various other health issues including the decline of her hearing, and eyesight, and short-term memory. After the stroke, she moved into an assisted living facility in Monroeville.

Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman was the original manuscript for what was to become To Kill a Mockingbird . It followed the lives of the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird at a later age. Scout was portrayed as a young woman in her twenties returning from New York City to her hometown in the south.

Her editor astutely requested that she review the story so that it’s told from the perspective of Scout as a child. Lee spent the next two years revising the story. Many years later, Go Set a Watchman was discovered by her lawyer, Tonja Carter, in a safe deposit box. HarperCollins announced its publication in July 2015. Controversy immediately ensued. Some wondered if the author, then 88, was coerced in any way. Lee issued this statement through her attorney: “I’m alive and kicking and happy as hell with the reactions to Watchman .”

What was most upsetting to readers was that the saintly Atticus of Mockingbird was portrayed in Watchman as a racist with ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

The novel sparked many debates. It won over many fans hungry for more about the beloved characters of Mockingbird but also broke the hearts of readers who disliked the revisionist view of Atticus. Another thing the book broke was sales records. It sold 720,000 copies in the first 36 hours of sales.

Reviews were far more mixed than they had been for Mockingbird. It gave comfort to some readers but not others that in the end, Go Set a Watchman wasn’t a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, but an early draft of the book that it would evolve into.

The legacy of Harper Lee

Though Harper Lee spent only a handful of years in the public eye, her contribution to literature and culture can’t be overstated. In addition to the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird , she received countless awards, including the Alabama Humanities Award (2002) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2007). Also in 2007, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Harper Lee died in her sleep on February 19, 2016, in her hometown of Monroeville and was buried in Hillcrest Cemetery. She was 89.

More about Harper Lee

On this site

• Quotes from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• A Pilgrimage to Harper Lee’s Monroeville, Alabama
• Dear Literary Ladies: What’s scarier, failure or success?

Major Works

• To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
• Go Set a Watchman (2015)

More information

• Biography.com
• 19 Things You Never Knew About Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird
• Reader discussion of Harper Lee’s books on Goodreads
• Harper Lee obituary

Biographies

• Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields
• Up Close: Harper Lee by Kerry Madden

Film adaptation

• To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Research and visit

• Monroe County Museum
• Harper Lee letters, Emory University

Categories: Author biography

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• Harper Lee Before <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>

Harper Lee Before To Kill a Mockingbird

H ere’s the thing, and it is not a small thing: Harper Lee was a smart, funny, happy woman. She used to like to play golf, spend time with friends in Monroeville, entertain visitors in New York City. To her friends and family, she was always Nelle.

She was not the first famous Lee from the South, of course, and it is fascinating that she was in fact related to Robert E. Lee. Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, to Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Her father, a lawyer and the model for Atticus Finch in the novel, had been born in Butler Country in 1880 and after he married Frances, the couple moved to Monroeville in 1912. There he was a supremely respected man and, in fact, served in the Alabama state legislature for a dozen years, from 1927 to 1939. As said earlier, he once defended two black men accused of killing a white storekeeper; both men were eventually convicted and hanged. Clearly this family remembrance made an impression on young Nelle.

But to emphasize: Hers was a mostly comfortable and congenial upbringing, far less strange than that of Scout Finch, not to mention that of Boo Radley.

Named, sort of, after one of her grandmothers (“Nelle” is “Ellen” backwards), she was the family’s youngest child and finally would survive brother Edwin (who died in 1951), sister Louise (who died in 2009) and sister Alice, who became a lawyer, took over their father’s practice and died in 2014.

Nelle would never marry, but she always had a passel of friends and admirers. In 1944 and ’45, she attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, and then switched to the University of Alabama, where she explored her burgeoning interest in writing (nurtured in high school) and her father’s interest in law. She would spend time as an exchange student at Oxford in England, and would spend other time contributing to Bama’s humor magazine Rammer-Jammer. She would, by 1949, land in New York City. There is nothing unusual about this smart young woman’s profile. Her arc was that of an achiever.

She had a particular pal in her youth, and this fact will always fascinate. The boy named Truman Streckfus Persons had moved to Monroeville in 1928 to live with his aunts, whose house was right over the stone wall from the Lees’ property. Nelle and Truman became close friends; much later, she would become commemorated as a character in his novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, and he, now named Truman Capote, would be, as already noted, immortalized as Dill in Mockingbird. They stayed in touch after moving on from Monroeville. Both continued to write—to each other, and then for millions of others.

In New York, Lee worked as a reservation clerk for Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways. During the 1950s, she worked on Go Set a Watchman, which could not find a publisher. She then went to work on To Kill a Mockingbird, and in 1957 signed a deal and embarked upon a two-year process of rewriting and refining.

Affairs get interesting here. On November 16, 1959, The New York Times ran a brief account of a crime in Kansas—“a wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home . . .”—that caught the attention of Capote. He determined to go to the Midwest and investigate; the fruits of his labors would be his ground-breaking 1966 book, In Cold Blood. As he set out on his grand enterprise, he realized that no one was better suited to help him interview the heartland natives than his empathetic-to-the-core friend from Monroeville, Nelle. And so, even on the verge of her own triumph in literature, she was recruited and went to Kansas with Capote. He would later tell George Plimpton for a New York Times Book Review piece that Lee was always, and in this instance certainly proved herself to be in spades, “a gifted woman, courageous, and with a warmth that instantly kindles most people, how- ever suspicious or dour.”

Because—until the publication of Watchman in 2015—Harper Lee had allowed her reputation to rest on one book alone, there had always been suspicion that the book was something other than a miracle. Because, also, Truman Capote was her devoted friend, there has always been a theory out there that he had something to do with the writing of Mockingbird. Such notions are nonsense, and the words of Capote himself—“I liked it [ To Kill a Mockingbird ] very much. She has real talent.”—say as much. Capote, of all people, would never have had any problem at all taking credit where credit was due, and he never really took any credit for his friend’s masterwork. So, in the Lee biography, there will always be that fascinating Capote interlude. (And what town can claim more scribbling geniuses per capita than Monroeville, Alabama?)

But to return to the biographical sketch: Lee wrote her novel. It quickly became the phenomenon it remains. And then she wrote no more.

Well, not quite true. In the early 1960s, with her first blush of fame still rosy, she wrote a couple of homey articles for McCall’s magazine and Vogue.

And then she pretty much stopped writing for the public, as the awards—the Pulitzer (first woman recipient for literature since 1942); the Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews; scores of others—and royalty checks regularly arrived in the mail. In its first two decades, the novel would be translated globally and would sell millions of copies. By now, it has sold more than 40 million.

Nelle Harper Lee’s world was one thing before 1960, then—especially after the film— it was something other. But she kept it as relatively the same, and as sane, as she could.

Read more in LIFE’s new special edition, The Enduring Legacy of Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird , available on Amazon .

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ARTS & CULTURE

Harper lee’s novel achievement.

With To Kill a Mockingbird, published 50 years ago, Lee gave America a story for the ages. Just don’t ask her about it

Charles Leerhsen

To spend an hour in Monroeville, Alabama, is to know why Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird , ranks as one of the crankiest writers on the planet. Strongly inclined to put aside the hype and hoopla and let literature speak for itself, Lee, the best-known native of the town (pop. 6,372) that served as the model for her novel’s Maycomb, has found herself living a short drive from one restaurant called the Mockingbird Grill and another named Radley’s Fountain, after Boo Radley, the character in Mockingbird who might be voted Least Likely to Become a Restaurateur. That would be a mere T-shirt’s toss from a gift shop peddling Mockingbird hats, tote bags, necklaces, Christmas ornaments, refrigerator magnets, wrist bands (inscribed “I see it, Scout, I see it!”) and paper fans. The gift shop is in the venerable courthouse where as a child Lee watched her father practice law, and which she later rendered so vividly in her book. The courthouse has long since been turned into a Mockingbird museum, to the delight of a constant stream of camera-toting tourists, foreign and domestic. I sympathize with Lee, who has steadfastly refused to take part in the merchandising of her most famous accomplishment. Life can’t be easy when everything you hate about success stands between you and the Piggly Wiggly.

This could be an especially maddening season for the 84-year-old author, given that 2010 marks the 50th year since To Kill a Mockingbird was published, and we all know how the media love anniversaries. Witness this very article, for example, though believe me no novelists were annoyed during its production. After what I had heard about her, I was too scared to knock on the door of her residence of record, a neat brick, reportedly book-lined house she shared with her older sister Alice, or even to request an interview through the closest thing there are to proper channels. I should also disclose at this juncture that I am working under the influence of Inspirational Writer’s Water, purchased at the gift shop described above.

Lee relied on perspiration as much as inspiration during the drawn-out creation of the book that, when it finally appeared on July 11, 1960, changed her life instantly and forever. Trans-lated into more than 40 languages, Mockingbird has sold over 30 million copies; with help from the anniversary hullabaloo, HarperCollins (the book was originally published by the now-defunct Lippincott) will probably sell at least a million more this year, mostly to high schools and junior high schools, where it has been a staple of reading lists since it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. The 1962 movie version, starring Gregory Peck, won three Oscars, yet somehow that earnest black-and-white film never trumped the three-dimensional chiaroscuro Mockingbird that shimmers in peoples’ imaginations after they experience Lee’s work on the printed page. Indeed, many say the story of Scout Finch; her lawyer father, Atticus; her brother, Jem; their neighbor Dill; and the ill-fated Tom Robinson is their all-time favorite novel. In surveys asking what one book every civilized person should read, Mockingbird routinely finishes second to the Bible, and in one (if I may go a bit Maycomb on you here) it up and finished first.

Readers have been living with the book for so long that they may not realize how profoundly odd this is. Mockingbird is hardly a marketer’s or publicist’s dream, and could easily have been dismissed as a downer. Set in the “tired old town” of Maycomb, in the unglamorous era of the Great Depression, it tells the story of a widower attorney who tries in vain to defend a black laborer from a wrongful charge of rape. It’s pretty clear at the outset that Tom Robinson’s word won’t be taken over that of the unstable white incest victim who accuses him. And...guess what? It isn’t. That maddening miscarriage of justice is not even the worst thing that happens to Robinson in the book. Like life itself, Mockingbird has no neat, symmetrical story arc, allowing obstacles to be introduced and then overcome before the ending. (That may be one reason the movie’s producer, Alan J. Pakula, said there was no studio stampede to acquire film rights.) The other thing Mockingbird lacks is what salespeople might call synergistic potential: it has no series mates, or even a sequel, that can help turn a book into a brand. There is no To Kill a Cockatiel or Valley of the Dills or Am I Boo? Mockingbird is Harper Lee’s one and only published book.

Lee has never discussed her output, or lack of one, publicly. Not since the mid-’60s has she said anything for the record about her career. “My book had a universal theme,” she told the Birmingham Post-Herald in 1962. “It’s not a ‘racial’ novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.”

But don’t call her a recluse. Miss Nelle, as she’s known around town (she went with her middle name on the dust jacket because she didn’t want Yankees to elide Nelle Lee into “Nellie”), is that tallish woman with closely cropped white hair who over the years you could see in the aisles of the grocery store or having coffee at Hardees, often in the company of Alice, who also never married. (Lee is rumored to have had a slight stroke in 2008.) They were living comfortably but not extravagantly a short walk from the site of the modest wood-frame house where she, and the book’s narrator, Scout, were raised. (In its place now is an ice-cream stand known, surprisingly, as Mel’s Dairy Dream, and not To Chill a Mockingbird .) She would play golf and, occasionally, fish. (“I’m not like Thomas Wolfe,” Lee said in a 1961 Life magazine interview. “I can go home again.”) During the summer, when she would migrate to New York City, she would go to museums and the theater and root for the Mets, the natural choice for someone with an underdog thing as big as the Ritz. In 2007, Lee went to the White House to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, from President George W. Bush (and said nothing that was reported). She has a quick and easy smile for those who respect her privacy. But reporters who request an interview through 98-year-old Alice, a sneaker-wearing attorney at the family firm and her sister’s semiofficial gatekeeper, can expect a polite but ironclad refusal. (“Hell no,” Lee herself once wrote in reply to a scribe’s request.)

It was not always thus. At first, perhaps buoyed by the mostly rave reviews and strong sales, Lee talked to almost anyone with a pad or microphone, saying that Atticus only superficially resembled her beloved father, A.C. (“one of the few men I’ve known who has genuine humility”) and the trial in her novel “was a composite of all the trials in the world” (as opposed to, say, a gloss on the Scottsboro Boys’ trial, as has been widely supposed). The questions, though, tended to be repetitive, annoyingly so. Journalists seemed obsessed with determining the degree to which the novel was autobiographical. Lee tended to say that her characters were basically fictional, but her biography does seem more ambiguous. After all, she had been a tomboy like Scout, with an older brother like Jem. A Boo Radleyish character lived just down her street. Dill, meanwhile, closely resembled the young Truman Capote, who as a boy had spent summers at his cousin’s house, next door to Lee’s.

Once interviewers broached the subject of Capote, Lee might have braced herself for a question that would have been not just annoying but insulting: Wasn’t it true that her pal Truman had written much of her book? Capote—always competitive, and, of course, a bit of a crackpot—didn’t discourage the rumor, answering vaguely when asked about his contributions to her novel. The truth (as is evident from Capote’s private correspondence) is that he did not write a word of Mockingbird , and that Lee, who assisted him as a reporter and researcher on In Cold Blood , contributed substantially more to Capote’s 1966 blockbuster than he ever admitted. Still, the rumor persists—to the point where it is addressed (and debunked) in one of the Monroeville museum’s exhibits.

Another distasteful question was the inevitable two-parter about what she was doing next and when the world would see it. Soon after Mockingbird appeared, Lee said, only half-jokingly, “All I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama,” and she began work on a second Southern novel, but its progress was slow. This in itself was not surprising: Mockingbird had not exactly fallen fully formed from Lee’s brain. She had turned out essays, humor pieces and short stories for campus publications during her one year at Huntingdon College in Montgomery and her years at the University of Alabama (where she studied law), but writing did not come easily to her. After she moved to New York City in 1949, she struggled for years with a hodgepodge of anecdotes about small-town Southern life, first called Go Set a Watchman and then Atticus . She received encouragement from an agent, Maurice Crain, and an editor, Lippincott’s Tay Hohoff, who had seen the work-in-progress, but one night in 1957 she flung the unfinished manuscript out the window of her Manhattan cold-water flat. After a teary phone call to Hohoff, Lee charged down the stairs, recovered the forsaken pages—and then began a title-on-down revision that resulted in a book that would become a Literary Guild selection and Book of the Month Club alternate, and that the New Yorker would call “unpretentious and totally ingenious” and the Chicago Tribune would hail as “a novel of strong contemporary national significance.”

Many years later, to a fan who engaged her in conversation in a fast-food restaurant in Monroeville, Lee would say straightforwardly that the success of Mockingbird “overwhelmed” her, making it impossible for her to write a follow-up book. She wrestled with that second novel for several years—and then one day Alice rather too calmly told a BBC interviewer that the manuscript had been stolen from their home and the project had been abandoned. (And Alice later told a Chicago Tribune reporter that the book never got beyond the conceptual stage.) In the mid-1980s Lee began researching a nonfiction book about an Alabama preacher suspected of being a serial killer, tentatively titled The Reverend . But she abandoned it, too, perhaps feeling that just as she could not out-Lee Lee she could not out-Capote Capote.

From this low point, however, Lee seems to have found her way to a place of relative peace. She did squawk a few years ago when the museum crossed a line in her mind and started selling a collection of recipes called Calpurnia’s Cookbook , after the black housekeeper in the novel. (The book was withdrawn.) But it seems that Lee has come to accept that she will publish only one book, and to enjoy that she exceeded her expectations in doing so. “When you’re at the top,” she once told her cousin Dickie Williams, “there is only one way to go.”

Lee will in all likelihood stand aside and let Mockingbird ’s 50th anniversary happen. Truth be told, Monroeville is a charming place, where the palpable pride in its native daughter’s achievement tends to make up for the occasional crassness. Besides, Monroe--villians have been exploiting Lee’s work for decades: when the movie came out in ’62, Charles J. Shields reports in his biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (2006), the local theater offered $10 to the first five people who showed up with live mockingbirds. Jane Ellen Clark, director of the Old Courthouse Museum, notes that pilgrims started flocking spontaneously to Monroeville in 1960, as soon as the book was published. “All these people who said it was their favorite book would save up for the trip and find the town,” she says. For thousands each year, “this was their vacation, and we created the museum because we wanted to give them something to see.” Every spring since 1991, the town has staged a several-times-a-week theatrical production of To Kill a Mockingbird with local volunteer actors in the roles. Act I takes place on the town square, weather permitting, and Act II inside the courthouse. If the air conditioning isn’t working, it can get steamy in that cavernous chamber, especially up in the “colored balcony” (as it was called in the ’30s), where I saw last year’s production. But if you’ve got a bottle of water, inspirational or otherwise, it makes for a uniquely American evening, right down to the realization that, as you’re standing and applauding for the sometimes contradictory notions of small-town values and racial tolerance, Harper Lee would prefer to be a thousand miles to the north, cheering, “Let’s Go, Mets!”

Charles Leerhsen wrote Crazy Good: The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America .

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Books of The Times | 'Mockingbird'

A Biography of Harper Lee, Author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

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By Janet Maslin

• June 8, 2006

In his introduction to the first book-length biography of Harper Lee, the elusive author of "To Kill a Mockingbird," Charles J. Shields tells the reader way too much about his research methods. He was determined to write this book even though Ms. Lee, who has been known to reply "Not just no, but hell no" to requests for interviews, wouldn't give him the time of day. So Mr. Shields had to be resourceful. He used the Internet to take the art of the cyberclip-job to bold new heights.

Mr. Shields, a former English teacher, says he "occasionally relied on unorthodox methods that were surprisingly effective." Translation: he faked his way onto an online school reunion site to contact Ms. Lee's classmates. He obtained a large amount of contact information for University of Alabama alumni and mass-mailed 300 in a single day. He let Google do the walking when it came to library research. And he e-mailed himself a hundred newspaper articles, courtesy of the online database of the University of Virginia.

He then went on to do actual legwork. But "Mockingbird" begins on a facile, slightly desperate note. "It started to snow in the Northeast at about dawn on March 3, 1960," Mr. Shields begins. How does he know? In the back of the book is the source for this observation: a Wall Street Journal article headlined "Severe Snowstorm Hits East, Stalls Traffic, Shuts Schools; Many Firms Close Early." Although Mr. Shields pads his book with similar minutiae (in 1949 there were 630,000 manholes in New York City), he also prompts some sympathy. After all, as his bibliography reveals, he had precious little else to go on. All he drew on were histories of the South, critical "Mockingbird" studies and material about Truman Capote, whose friendship with Ms. Lee was as catty as it was intense.

"I think it very undignified for any serious artist to allow themselves to be exploited in this fashion," Capote sniffed. He said he was appalled by the crass spectacle of Ms. Lee helping to promote the Oscar-winning film version of her instant-classic novel.

But she seems to have agreed with him. Unmanageable success made her determined to vanish, which is one more reason Mr. Shields has set himself a tough job. It is all he can do to come up with answers to the three most frequently asked questions about Ms. Lee: Is she dead? Is she gay? What ever happened to Book No. 2?

No, none of your business and none of your business: those are the best answers at which "Mockingbird" arrives. But it fares better at filling in the basic details of Ms. Lee's life, from the reason Nelle Harper Lee didn't use her first name in print (she didn't want "Nelle" pronounced as "Nellie") to the genesis of her novel and its characters. Even though he never gets close to the flinty Ms. Lee, Mr. Shields constructs a worthwhile portrait of the artist.

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Struggling life, some important facts of her life, writing career, harper lee’s major works, harper lee’s impact on future literature, famous quotes, related posts:, post navigation.

Harper Lee and Truman Capote Were Childhood Friends Until Jealously Tore Them Apart

Each became a character in the other’s work

The son of a teenaged mother and a salesman father, Capote (then known as Truman Persons) moved to Monroeville, Alabama at age 4 to live with his aunt following his parents’ divorce. He soon befriended Nelle Harper Lee, the daughter of a well-regarded lawyer and journalist, A.C. Lee. The young pair bonded over their shared love of reading and developed an early interest in writing by collaborating on stories written on a typewriter purchased for them by Lee’s father.

Although she was two years younger, Lee acted as Capote’s protector, shielding the tiny, highly sensitive boy from neighborhood bullies. Lee would later say that she and Capote were united by “common anguish” over their childhoods, as Capote’s troubled mother repeatedly abandoned him as she sought financial security, and Lee’s mother suffered from what scholars now believe to be bipolar disorder.

Their friendship continued even after Capote moved to New York City to live with his mother as a pre-teen. Forgoing college, the precocious Capote landed a job at The New Yorker magazine and published a series of pieces that caught the attention of publishers, leading to a contract for his first book. In 1948, Other Voices, Other Rooms , his first novel, was published. Its main character, Joel, was based on Capote. The tomboy character of Idabel Tompkins was a fictionalized version of Lee. Capote’s early success convinced Lee moved to New York City the following year. She began working on her own book, To Kill a Mockingbird , depicting her Alabama childhood and basing the character of Dill Harris on Capote.

Lee played a crucial role in Capote’s most famous work

In November 1959, Capote read a brief story in The New York Times about the brutal murder of a wealthy family in a small Kansas town. Intrigued, he pitched the idea for an investigative story to The New Yorker magazine, whose editor quickly agreed. As Capote made plans to head west, he realized he needed an assistant. Lee had just submitted her final manuscript for To Kill a Mockingbird to her publishing house and had ample time on her hands. Lee had long been fascinated by crime cases and had even studied criminal law before dropping out of school and moving to New York.

Capote hired her, and the two made their way to Holcomb, Kansas, a few weeks later. Lee proved invaluable, as her comforting Southern manner helped blunt Capote’s more flamboyant personality. Decades later, many in Holcomb still recalled Lee with fondness, while seemingly holding Capote at arm’s length. Thanks to Lee, local residents, law enforcement and friends of the slain Clutter family opened their doors to the unlikely pair.

Each night, Capote and Lee retired to a small motel outside of town to go over the events of the day. Lee would eventually contribute more than 150 pages of richly detailed notes, depicting everything from the size and color of the furniture in the Clutter home to what television show was playing in the background as the pair interviewed sources. She even wrote an anonymous article in a journal for former FBI agents in early 1960, which praised the lead detective on the Clutter case and promoted Capote’s ongoing work. Her authorship of the article in The Grapevine wasn’t revealed until 2016.

Jealousy helped sour their relationship

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in July 1960, and became a runaway success, earning Lee a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, followed by an Academy Award-winning motion picture. It would eventually sell more than 30 million copies and become a beloved classic. Capote’s jealousy over Lee’s financial and critical success gnawed at him, leading to a growing rift between the two. As Lee would write to a friend many years later, “I was his oldest friend, and I did something Truman could not forgive: I wrote a novel that sold. He nursed his envy for more than 20 years.”

Despite the tension, Lee continued to help Capote on the Clutter project, as he became increasingly obsessed with the case, developing relationships with the two men convicted and eventually executed for the crime. It took him nearly five years to publish his New Yorke r series, which he then expanded into a book. When In Cold Blood was published in 1966 it too was a sensation, with many hailing Capote for creating a new genre, the “true crime” narrative non-fiction.

But some, including Lee (at least in private), criticized his willingness to alter facts and situations to fit his narrative. She would later describe Capote in a letter to a friend, noting, “I don’t know if you understood this about him, but his compulsive lying was like this: if you said, ‘Did you know JFK was shot?’ He’d easily answer, ‘Yes, I was driving the car he was riding in.’”

Despite her years of work and her unending public support of Capote’s work, he did not officially recognize her contributions to In Cold Blood , instead of mentioning both her and his lover in the book’s acknowledgments section. Lee was deeply hurt by the omission.

The two clashed over Capote’s self-destructive lifestyle

Capote’s literary career went into decline following In Cold Blood . Though he wrote a number of articles for magazines and newspapers, he never published another novel. Instead, he became a fixture of the post-war jet set, partying and befriending a number of high-profile figures, including a group of mostly married, wealthy women who he dubbed his “Swans.” In 1975, Esquire magazine published a chapter of Capote’s unfinished book, Answered Prayers . The excerpt, a thinly-veiled account of the lives and scandalous loves of many of Capote’s society friends, was a disaster, leading many of them to ostracize him and leaving his literary career in tatters.

As Capote descended into a life of alcohol, drugs, television show appearances, and Studio 54 night-clubbing, the publicity-phobic Lee pulled away from the spotlight entirely. She lived quietly in Alabama, along with under-the-radar trips to New York City. Her refusal to grant interviews and the lack of a follow-up to Mockingbird led to decades of rumors that it actually was Capote who had written all or part of the book – although the publicity-mad Capote certainly would have revealed his role if that had been the case.

By the time of Capote’s death in 1984, he was estranged from many of the people with whom he’d once been close, including Lee. She died in 2016 just months after the publication of Go Set a Watchmen , an early version of To Kill a Mockingbird , which Lee had set aside in the 1950s. The book raced up the charts, although fans of Mockingbird were shocked to discover a far less idealized version of Atticus Finch, the lawyer character based on Lee’s father. But this first draft did include remembrances from Lee’s early years, including Dill Harris, easily recognizable as the brash young boy named Truman whom the shy Lee had befriended years before.

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I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee Paperback – Illustrated, July 14, 2015

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most widely read novels in American literature. It's also a perennial favorite in highschool English classrooms across the nation. Yet onetime author Harper Lee is a mysterious figure who leads a very private life in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, refusing to give interviews or talk about the novel that made her a household name. Lee's life is as rich as her fiction, from her girlhood as a rebellious tomboy to her days at the University of Alabama and early years as a struggling writer in New York City. Charles J. Shields is the author of the New York Times bestselling biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee , which he has adapted here for younger readers. What emerges in this riveting portrait is the story of an unconventional, high-spirited woman who drew on her love of writing and her Southern home to create a book that continues to speak to new generations of readers. Anyone who has enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird or Go Set a Watchman will appreciate this glimpse into the life of its fascinating author, which includes photographs of Harper Lee, her family, and the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird starring Gregory Peck. I Am Scout is a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

• Reading age 9 - 12 years
• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Grade level 7 - 9
• Lexile measure 1120L
• Dimensions 5.58 x 0.76 x 8.21 inches
• Publication date July 14, 2015
• ISBN-10 1250082218
• ISBN-13 978-1250082213
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“Readers will come away with the sense not only that they know the writer of [To Kill a Mockingbird,] but also that she is someone that they would quite like.” ― The Bulletin “An absorbing and easy narrative style.” ― Kirkus Reviews “A fascinating look at the unconventional Lee.” ― Booklist “A surprisingly fascinating read.” ― School Library Journal “A page-turner.” ― ElleGirl

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Square Fish; Reprint edition (July 14, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250082218
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250082213
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 9 - 12 years
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1120L
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 7 - 9
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.58 x 0.76 x 8.21 inches
• #37 in Teen & Young Adult Literary Biographies

About the author

Charles j. shields.

Charles J. Shields is an American biographer of Mid-Century American novelists.

In 1997, Shields left a career in education to write independently. Over the course of the next six years, he published 20 histories and biographies for young people. His first biography for adults, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Holt, 2006) went on to become a New York Times bestseller. "This biography will not disappoint those who loved the novel and the feisty, independent, fiercely loyal Scout, in whom Harper Lee put so much of herself," wrote Garrison Keillor in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. "As readable, convincing, and engrossing as Lee's literary wonder," said the Orlando Sentinel.

Two years later, Shields followed-up his biography of Lee with a young adult version: I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee, which received awards from American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults; Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year; Arizona Grand Canyon Young Readers Master List.

In 2009, with fellow biographers Nigel Hamilton, James McGrath Morris, and Debby Applegate, Shields co-founded Biographers International Organization (BIO), a non-profit organization founded to promote the art and craft of biography.

In November 2011, Shields published the first biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life (Holt), described as an "incisive, gossipy page-turner of a biography," by Janet Maslin and an "engrossing, definitive biography" by Publishers Weekly in a starred review. It was selected as a New York Times Notable Book, and Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book for 2011.

In 2016, Lebowski Publisher in the Netherlands will publish John Williams: The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel. Williams is the author of Butcher's Crossing, Stoner, and Augustus, which won the 1972 National Book Award.

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Customers find the content very informative and well-written. They also appreciate the wonderful biography that brings them closer to the author.

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Customers find the book very informative and well written.

"...enthusiastic about it in the beginning; however, it is great source for excerpts in connection with To Kill a Mockingbird, which will lead many..." Read more

"...Easy read and enlightening . I appreciated. ciatd the kindness wit which the story is told." Read more

"...Well written, measured, and covers her life in a thoughtful, and researched matter without losing the humanity of the subject and her life...." Read more

"...This biography provided interesting insights into the life of Harper Lee, and I saw many connections to TKAM...." Read more

Customers find the biography wonderful and provide a narrative of Harper Lee's mother.

" Well written biography allowing a view into Harper Lee's world. Easy read and enlightening. I appreciated...." Read more

"...This biography provides a narrative of why Harper Lee’s mother was not described in the book...." Read more

"... Wonderful biography , brings you closer to the woman who authored the award winning book." Read more

" Reading this biography is helpful in understanding To Kill a Mockingbird; wonder how many high school have read the bio first." Read more

Customers find the writing style of the book very well written.

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"Best biography of the elusive Harper Lee. Well written , measured, and covers her life in a thoughtful, and researched matter without losing the..." Read more

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