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"This night my mind was filled with Halloween -- there was to be a pageant representing our county's agricultural products; I was to be a ham. Jem said he would escort me to the school auditorium. Thus began our longest journey together." — Scout Finch
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The Author
Nelle Harper Lee was born April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, to Amasa Coleman and Frances (Finch) Lee. Nelle is her grandmother’s name spelled backward. She is a descendant of Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War.
Lee's father had been born in Butler County, Alabama, in 1880 and moved to Monroeville in 1913. He served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1927 to 1939. Before A. C. Lee became a title lawyer, he once defended two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Both clients, a father and son, were hanged. He is the model for Atticus Finch, hero of To Kill a Mockingbird
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. In high school Lee was fortunate to have a gifted English teacher, Gladys Watson Burkett, who introduced her to literature and the rigors of writing well. Lee loved 19th-century British authors, and once said that her ambition was to become "the Jane Austen of south Alabama."
Lee attended Huntingdon College, a private school for women in Montgomery, Alabama, from 1944 to 1945. She transferred to the University of Alabama, which she attended from 1945 to 1950. While there, she contributed to several student publications, including the humor magazine Rammer-Jammer. In 1947, she enrolled at the University of Alabama School of Law but she hated it despite her father's hopes that she would become a local attorney.
Lee moved to New York City in 1950, and worked for several years as a reservations clerk for Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways. When friends offered to loan her enough money to write full-time for a year, she quit her job and penned the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1957, she submitted the manuscript to a publishing house and began a two-year process of revision.
To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 to highly favorable reviews and quickly climbed the bestseller lists, where it remained for 88 weeks. In 1961, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize.
According to biographer Charles J. Shields, Lee was unprepared for the amount of personal attention associated with writing a bestseller. Ever since, she has led a quiet and guardedly private life. In 2007 Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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