Harper Lee

Harper Lee
Nelle Harper Lee
Born April 28, 1926 (age 89)
Monroeville, Alabama
Pen name Harper Lee
Occupation Novelist
Nationality American
Period 1960-present
Genre Literature and Fiction
Literary movement Southern Gothic
Notable works To Kill a Mockingbird

Signature

Nelle Harper Lee (born April 28, 1926) is an American novelist widely known for her 1960
Pulitzer Prize–winning To Kill a Mockingbird, which deals with the racism she observed as a
child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Though Lee published only this single book for
half a century, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to
literature.[1] Lee has received numerous honorary degrees, and declined to speak on each
occasion. Lee assisted close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood
(1966).[2]

In February 2015, aged 88, after a lifetime of maintaining that she would never publish another
novel, Lee released a statement through her lawyer confirming publication of a second novel, Go
Set a Watchman, written before To Kill a Mockingbird, which was released in July 2015.

Early life

Nelle Harper Lee was born and raised in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of four children of
Frances Cunningham (Finch) and Amasa Coleman Lee.[5] Her first name, Nelle, was her
grandmother's name spelled backwards, and the name she uses.[6] Harper Lee is her pen name.[6]
Her mother was a homemaker; her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, practiced
law and served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1926 to 1938. 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.[7] Nelle Lee had three siblings: Alice Finch Lee (1911–
2014),[8] Louise Lee Conner (1916–2009) and Edwin Lee (1920–1951).[9]

While enrolled at Monroe County High School, Lee developed an interest in English literature.
After graduating from high school in 1944,[5] she attended the then all-female Huntingdon
College in Montgomery for a year, then transferred to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa,
where she studied law for several years, and wrote for the university newspaper, but did not
complete a degree.[5]

To Kill a Mockingbird

In 1949, Lee moved to New York City and took a job as an airline reservation agent, writing fiction in her
spare time.[5] Having written several long stories, Lee found an agent in November 1956. The following
month, at Michael Brown's East 50th Street townhouse, she received a gift of a year's wages from friends
with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas."

Origin

According to Lee, she had first written a book called Go Set a Watchman in the mid-1950s. The
book is about a woman named Scout, returning to her home town of Maycomb from New York
to visit Atticus, her lawyer father. Lee said that her editor persuaded her to rework some of
Watchman 's material, in which Scout has flashbacks to her childhood, as a novel in their own
right—and that book became To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee stated, "I was a first-time writer, so I
did as I was told. …[12][13] … It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I
thought it a pretty decent effort."

Lee eventually showed an early manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird to Tay Hohoff, an editor at
J. B. Lippincott & Co. At this point, it still resembled a string of stories, more than the novel Lee
had intended. Under Hohoff's guidance, two and a half years of rewriting followed.[14] When the
novel was finally ready, she opted to use the name "Harper Lee", rather than risk having her first
name Nelle be misidentified as "Nellie".[15]

Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate bestseller and won great
critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It remains a bestseller, with
more than 30 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll
by the Library Journal.[16]

Autobiographical details in the novel

Like Lee, the tomboy Scout of the novel is the daughter of a respected small-town Alabama
attorney. Scout's friend, Dill, was inspired by Lee's childhood friend and neighbor, Truman
Capote;[7] Lee, in turn, is the model for a character in Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other
Rooms, published in 1948. Although the plot of Lee's novel involves an unsuccessful legal
defense similar to one undertaken by her advocate father, the 1931 landmark Scottsboro Boys
interracial rape case may also have helped to shape Lee's social conscience.[17]
 While Lee herself has downplayed autobiographical parallels in the book, Truman Capote,
mentioning the character Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, described details he considered
autobiographical: "In my original version of Other Voices, Other Rooms I had that same man
living in the house that used to leave things in the trees, and then I took that out. He was a real
man, and he lived just down the road from us. We used to go and get those things out of the
trees. Everything she wrote about it is absolutely true. But you see, I take the same thing and
transfer it into some Gothic dream, done in an entirely different way."[18]

After To Kill a Mockingbird

Middle years

After completing To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee accompanied Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to assist
him in researching what they thought would be an article on a small town's response to the
murder of a farmer and his family. Capote expanded the material into his best-selling book, In
Cold Blood, published in 1966.

Since publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee has granted almost no requests for interviews or
public appearances and, with the exception of a few short essays, published nothing further, until
2015. She did work on a follow-up novel—The Long Goodbye—but eventually filed it away
unfinished.[19] During the mid-1980s, she began a factual book about an Alabama serial
murderer, but also put it aside when she was not satisfied.[19] Her withdrawal from public life
prompted unfounded speculation that new publications were in the works.

Lee said of the 1962 Academy Award–winning screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird
by Horton Foote: "I think it is one of the best translations of a book to film ever made."[21] She
became a friend of Gregory Peck's, and remains close to the actor's family; Peck's grandson,
Harper Peck Voll, is named after her.[citation needed] Peck won an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus
Finch, the father of the novel's narrator, Scout.

In January 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Lee to the National Council on the
Arts.[22]

In 1966, Lee wrote a letter to the editor in response to the attempts of a Richmond, Virginia, area
school board to ban To Kill a Mockingbird as "immoral literature":

James J. Kilpatrick, the editor of The Richmond News Leader, started the Beadle Bumble fund to
pay fines for victims of what he termed "despots on the bench". He built the fund using
contributions from readers, and later used it to defend books as well as people. After the board in
Richmond ordered schools to dispose of all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird, Kilpatrick wrote,
"A more moral novel scarcely could be imagined." In the name of the Beadle Bumble fund, he
then offered free copies to children who wrote in, and by the end of the first week, he had given
away 81 copies.[23]
 When Lee attended the 1983 Alabama History and Heritage Festival in Eufaula, Alabama, she
presented the essay "Romance and High Adventure".[24]

Late in 1978, Lee spent some time in Alexander City, Alabama, researching a true-crime book
called The Reverend.[25]

2005–2014

In March 2005, Lee arrived in Philadelphia – her first trip to the city since signing with publisher
Lippincott in 1960 – to receive the inaugural ATTY Award for positive depictions of attorneys in
the arts from the Spector Gadon & Rosen Foundation.[26] At the urging of Peck's widow,
Veronique Peck, Lee traveled by train from Monroeville to Los Angeles in 2005 to accept the
Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award.[27] She also has attended luncheons for students who
have written essays based on her work, held annually at the University of Alabama.[21][28] On
May 21, 2006, she accepted an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame, where
graduating seniors saluted her with copies of To Kill a Mockingbird during the ceremony.[29]

On May 7, 2006, Lee wrote a letter to Oprah Winfrey (published in O, The Oprah Magazine in
July 2006). Lee wrote about her love of books as a child and her dedication to the written word.
"Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods and
minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books."[30]

While attending an August 20, 2007, ceremony inducting four members into the Alabama
Academy of Honor, Lee responded to an invitation to address the audience with: "Well, it's better
to be silent than to be a fool."

On November 5, 2007, George W. Bush presented Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
This is the highest civilian award in the United States and recognizes individuals who have made
"an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States,
world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors".[32][33]

In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded Lee the National Medal of Arts, the highest award
given by the United States government for "outstanding contributions to the excellence, growth,
support and availability of the arts".[34]

In a 2011 interview with an Australian newspaper, Rev. Dr. Thomas Lane Butts said Lee now
lives in an assisted-living facility, wheelchair-bound, partially blind and deaf, and suffering from
memory loss. Butts also shared that Lee told him why she never wrote again, "Two reasons: one,
I wouldn't go through the pressure and publicity I went through with To Kill a Mockingbird for
any amount of money. Second, I have said what I wanted to say, and I will not say it again."[35]

On May 3, 2013, Lee had filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court to regain the
copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird, seeking unspecified damages from a son-in-law of her
former literary agent and related entities. Lee claimed that the man "engaged in a scheme to
dupe" her into assigning him the copyright on the book in 2007, when her hearing and eyesight
 were in decline, and she was residing in an assisted living facility after having suffered a
stroke.[36][37][38] In September, attorneys for both sides announced a settlement of the lawsuit.[39]

In February 2014, Lee settled a lawsuit against the Monroe County Heritage Museum for an
undisclosed amount. The suit alleged that the museum had used her name and the title To Kill a
Mockingbird to promote itself and to sell souvenirs without her consent.[40][41] Lee's attorneys
had filed a trademark application on August 19, 2013, to which the museum filed an opposition.
This prompted Lee's attorney to file a lawsuit on October 15 that same year, "which takes issue
the museum's website and gift shop, which it accuses of 'palming off its goods', including t-
shirts, coffee mugs other various trinkets with Mockingbird brands."[42]

2015: Go Set a Watchman

According to Lee's lawyer Tonja Carter, following an initial meeting to appraise Lee's assets in
2011, she re-examined Lee's safe-deposit box in 2014 and found the manuscript for Go Set a
Watchman, which she had previously assumed to be an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird.
After contacting Lee and reading the manuscript, she passed it on to Lee’s agent Andrew
Nurnberg.[43][44] It was originally thought that the Watchman manuscript was lost. On February 3,
2015, it was announced that HarperCollins would publish Go Set a Watchman,[45] which includes
many of the same characters as To Kill a Mockingbird.[46] According to Nurnberg, Mockingbird
was originally intended to be the first book of a trilogy: "They discussed publishing Mockingbird
first, Watchman last, and a shorter connecting novel between the two."[47]

The book was published in July 2015 as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, though it was
completed before the latter. The book is set some 20 years after the events in Mockingbird, when
Scout returns as an adult from New York to visit her father in Maycomb, Alabama.[48] It alludes
to Scout's view of her father, Atticus Finch, as the moral compass ("watchman") of Maycomb,[49]
and, according to the publisher, how she finds upon her return to Maycomb, that she "is forced to
grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father's attitude
toward society and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her
childhood."[50]

The publication of the new novel (announced by her lawyer) raised concerns over why Lee, who
for 55 years had maintained that she would never write another book, would suddenly choose to
publish again. Lee's sister and protector from public scrutiny, who died in November 2014,[51]
wrote in 2011, that Lee "can’t see and can’t hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone
in whom she has confidence."[4] In February 2015, the State of Alabama, through its Human
Resources Department, launched an investigation into whether Lee was competent enough to
consent to the publishing of Go Set a Watchman.[6] The investigation found that the claims of
coercion and elder abuse were unfounded,[52] and, according to Lee's laywer, Lee is "happy as
hell" with the publication.[53]

Fictional portrayals

Harper Lee was portrayed by Catherine Keener in the film Capote (2005), by Sandra Bullock in
the film Infamous (2006), and by Tracey Hoyt in the TV movie Scandalous Me: The Jacqueline
 Susann Story (1998). In the adaptation of Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1995), the
character of Idabel Thompkins, who was inspired by Truman Capote's memories of Harper Lee
as a child, was played by Aubrey Dollar.

Works

Books

 To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

 Go Set a Watchman (2015)

Articles

 "Love—In Other Words". (April 15, 1961) Vogue, pp. 64–65

 "Christmas to Me". (December 1961) McCall's
 "When Children Discover America". (August 1965) McCall's
 "Romance and High Adventure" (1983), a paper presented in Eufaula, Alabama, and collected in
1985 in the anthology Clearings in the Thicket.
 Open letter to Oprah Winfrey (July 2006), O: The Oprah Magazine
What Is Southern Gothic Literature?
Southern Gothic literature is a genre of Southern writing. The stories often focus on grotesque
themes. While it may include supernatural elements, it mainly focuses on damaged, even delusional,
characters.
Southern Gothic literature was inspired by early Gothic writing, a genre that was popular in 18th
century England. In Gothic literature, the authors wanted to expose the problems they saw in
society. The authors wrote fiction, but included supernatural and romantic elements. They were often
stories of hauntings, death, darkness and madness. Some of the more well-known examples of this
genre are Frankenstein and Dracula.
While Gothic writing initially began in England, American Gothic literature began in the 19th century,
with short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Nathaniel Hawthorne also writes
with a sense of mystery, and his characters are very flawed. There are some supernatural elements
to his writings and many questions about the society that they represent. Poe's short stories usually
focus on death, but he tells the tale of death with a dark humor and a desire to expose the
complexity of his characters and society.
Writers, such as William Faulkner, began writing a more specifically Southern form of American
Gothic in the 1920s. However, the Southern Gothic genre reached its height in popularity in the
1940s-1960s.

Characteristics of the Genre

Although inspired by Gothic literature, Southern Gothic does not dwell on suspense and the
supernatural. Rather, there is a dark humor in the stories. It follows the idea of exposing the
problems of society, but does so by developing complex characters. The authors explored the
behaviors of people (usually strange) and the social order of the South. Through their stories, the
authors hoped to show that the social order was fragile, and the realities behind it were actually
disturbing. The authors work to point out truths of Southern culture and its moral shortcomings. The
themes of this genre are developed around these goals.
The stories of Southern Gothic are, of course, set in the South. They may take place on a plantation,
old slave quarters or broken downtowns. There are many Southern elements in the stories, including
dialect, habits and personalities. The history of the South is represented through the settings of the
stories.
The characters are usually complex, and many of them are mentally unstable. Many of the
characters are broken in spirit and struggling to find a place in society once again. The morality of
characters is often questioned. Through their characters, the authors examine the harm that people
can do to each other. There are also many characters that are seen as innocent, such as the
mentally handicapped, and there is a struggle for their place in the world. Whether mentally
unstable, dark or innocent, the characters try to make sense of the world around them and the
society in which they live.
The plots of Southern Gothic stories can be disturbing and some do include supernatural elements.
They often contain ironic events as a writing style. Many of the events contained in the stories are
linked to racism, violence and poverty.

http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/gcse/mockingbird.htm