Harper Lee

HARPER LEE was an American writer.

Nell Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in the small town of Monroeville in the southwestern part of Alabama. She was the youngest child of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee (there were four children in the family altogether). Her father, a former newspaper owner and editor, was a lawyer and served in public office from 1926 to 1938. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and began reading at an early age. She was friends with a classmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote.

Lee was only five years old when, in April 1931, the first trials in the case of the alleged rape of two white women by nine young Black men were held in the small town of Scottsboro. The defendants, who had nearly been lynched before the trial, were provided with legal counsel only once the case began to be heard in court. Despite a medical report stating that the women had not been raped, the all-white jury found all the defendants guilty and sentenced them to death, with the exception of the youngest, who was thirteen. Over the following six years in the appeals process, most of these convictions were overturned, and all the defendants except one were released. The Scottsboro case made an indelible impression on the young Harper Lee, who many years later would use it as the basis for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

After graduating from high school in Monroeville, Lee entered Huntingdon College for Women in Montgomery, studied law at the University of Alabama, and joined the sorority Chi Omega. During this time, she published several student stories and spent about a year as editor of the humor magazine Rammer Jammer. She never completed university, but she did spend a summer in Oxford, England, then settled in New York and worked as a clerk for the Eastern Air Lines and BOAC airline offices.

Lee continued working for the airlines until the late 1950s, when she decided to devote herself to writing. She lived modestly, splitting her time between two homes: she had her own apartment in New York without hot water, and at times she stayed in her parents’ house in Alabama, where her ill father still lived.

After writing