Harper Lee (1920- ). Biography and creative work

Nelle Harper Lee was born April 28, 1926, in a small Alabama town where she still lives today. Unlike most sleepy, southern towns, Monroeville welcomes thousands of visitors each year; millions of readers know it as Maycomb, Alabama—the hometown of the fictional Finch family in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Lee’s only novel has never been out of print and, since its publication, has sold millions of copies. To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The novel, according to a 1989 survey, was one of the top five books taught in high schools across the nation (Applebee 27) and was named as second only to the Bible in making a difference in the lives of 5,000 respondents according to a 1991 Book-of-the-Month Club survey (Shields 1). Jean Louise Finch (“Scout”); her brother, Jem; their father, Atticus; Jem and Scout’s friend, Dill; and Tom Robinson, the falsely accused man Atticus defends—all are characters whose lives in Maycomb have fascinated readers for over 40 years.

Lee was the youngest of Frances Finch and Amasa Coleman Lee’s four children. Her father, a financial adviser, lawyer, newspaper owner, state legislator, and successful businessman, moved to Monroeville in 1912 with his wife and first child, Alice. As a young lawyer, A. C. Lee inspired his novelist daughter, defending two African-American men, confronting the Ku Klux Klan as they marched in Monroeville, and expressing intolerance for bigotry, racism, and political corruption in frequent newspaper editorials. Unlike the mother in To Kill a Mockingbird, who dies when Scout is two, Frances Finch Lee lived until Harper Lee was 25. However, Mrs. Lee suffered from poor health, which her family called a nervous disorder, for years before her death. Because she experienced severe mood swings and eccentric, unpredictable behavior, the Lee family depended on Hattie Belle Clausell, an African-American woman, who cared and cooked for them. She appears in To Kill a Mockingbird as Calpurnia, the cook and caretaker. Mrs. Lee may have inspired Aunt Alexandra, whom Scout describes in To Kill a Mockingbird as “analogous to Mount Everest . . . cold and there.”

Harper Lee, known always as Nelle (her maternal grandmother’s name spelled backward) to her friends and family, was a precocious, athletic girl who often aggravated her teachers with her impertinence. Lee’s best friend in Monroeville was a small, intelligent boy sent by his mother from Meridian, Mississippi, to Monroeville first in the summer of 1928, then by 1930 to live for several years with his relatives the Faulks, next-door neighbors to the Lees. Truman Persons, later adopted by a stepfather whose surname was Capote, remained Harper Lee’s close friend until near the end of his life. As children they played word games, read voraciously, wrote stories, and dramatized them. In a 1967 interview with Gloria Steinem, Truman Capote described Lee and himself as “apart people” (quoted in Shields 44). They were drawn to each other not only by their intelligence and creative imagination but also through their shared ambition to be writers.

Characters in these early stories and later ones by Lee and Capote often drew on the eccentricities of their South Alabama Avenue neighbors. One Monroeville household proved to be an especially rich source of material. Mr. and Mrs. Boleware lived in a shabby, rundown house with their two daughters and one son, called Son, who as a teenager was imprisoned in his house, supposedly tied to his bed, as punishment by his father. Son was said to emerge occasionally at night as a peeping tom, but few ever saw him or heard his strange-sounding voice. Children were not allowed in the Bolewares’ yard even to retrieve the occasional ball hit from the nearby schoolyard. Though not as feared as the Bolewares, other neighbors on South Alabama Avenue provided character detail, sneaking bourbon into their iced tea, dipping tobacco, playing the fiddle, and loudly quarreling among themselves (Shields 52-53).

Harper Lee explained in a 1964 interview that life in a small town “naturally produces more writers than, say, an environment like 82nd Street in New York. In small town life and in rural life you know your neighbors. Not only do you know everything about your neighbors, but you know everything about them from the time they came to the country” (quoted in Shields 51). Remembering these neighbors she knew so well would be invaluable for Harper Lee as she created her own small-town characters.

While Lee describes growing up in Monroeville with little money and few luxuries, typical circumstances of Depression era children, she was the child of educated, upper-middle-class parents. Her mother was a graduate of the Alabama Girls’ Industrial School, where she studied Latin and English and excelled in music. Lee’s father taught for three years, served as a bookkeeper and financial manager for a law firm, and several years later became a lawyer and partner in the firm. He purchased the local paper in 1929; ran it with his oldest daughter, Alice; wrote editorials for it; and served in the Alabama State Legislature. Lee’s childhood was much more affluent than that of most children growing up in southern Alabama in the 1930s, particularly that of the children of poor farmers and laborers, black and white. She was always able to attend school—her parents could have sent her to private school if they had so chosen. She also knew she would go to college, as had her older sisters and brother—a luxury that many children all over the nation, but especially in the South, would not have.

Lee graduated from Monroe County High School in 1944 and enrolled that fall in Huntingdon College, a college for women in Montgomery, Alabama. Huntingdon required attendance at chapel every morning and enforced strict rules dictating their students’ dress code and behavior. An instructor seated with students during meals checked to see that students’ feet remained flat on the floor and all used the proper silverware while eating. Huntingdon College did not prove to be particularly suitable for the headstrong, nonconformist Nelle Harper Lee. Classmates remember her smoking a pipe, swearing freely, wearing no makeup, and preferring jeans or Bermuda shorts to skirts, cardigan sweaters, and pearls (Shields 72). In the spring of her first and only year at Huntingdon, Lee was one of seven students inducted into the national literary society, Chi Delta Phi, and had two pieces of fiction published in the college’s literary magazine—the beginning of her career as a published writer.

In fall 1945, Lee transferred to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. That September, World War II officially ended; once again there were men as well as women attending the university (women had far outnumbered men during the war years). As at Huntingdon, Harper Lee refused to conform to the expected mores of a young southern woman. She smoked openly, wore men’s pajamas, and sported jeans as she left campus to go golfing. She wrote for the campus humor magazine, the Rammer Jammer, later becoming its editor, and contributed pieces for the newspaper, Crimson White. Lee often expressed in her sometimes sarcastic, satirical articles liberal views on race, reflecting what she had learned at home. During her junior year (1946-47) Lee applied and was admitted to the University of Alabama School of Law. By 1948, having completed her second year of law school, Lee informed her father she was dissatisfied. Hoping to appease her, he agreed to send her to study in Oxford, England, for the summer. On her return, Lee attended one more semester before leaving during Christmas break without finishing her degree or taking her qualifying law exams.

Though A. C. Lee longed for his youngest child to become a lawyer and join his law practice along with her older sister, Harper Lee was determined to be a writer. Her friend, Truman Capote, had already published his first work, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948. A character in Capote’s first novel is a forceful young woman who envies the freedom of being a male; Isabel Thompkins in Other Voices, Other Rooms resembles the young Harper Lee. Twelve years later, Harper Lee would use Truman Capote as a model for the character Dill in her novel. After she moved to New York City in 1949 to be a writer, Lee supported herself by working a number of uninspiring jobs, including reservations clerk with Eastern Airlines and British Overseas Airways. She wrote nights and weekends and traveled back and forth to Monroeville to see her family. One very difficult return to Monroeville was for the funeral of her mother in 1951. Tragically, six weeks later, Lee’s older brother, Edwin, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 30. Soon after their deaths, Mr. Lee moved to a brick ranch-style house with his daughters. But Harper Lee returned to New York, determined to fulfill her dream of publishing fiction.

By November 1956, Harper Lee had completed a series of stories. With help from friends she met with an agent, Maurice Crain, and his wife, Annie Laurie Williams. They encouraged her to develop one of her stories into a novel. That Christmas, Lee’s friends, Joy and Michael Brown, surprised her with a generous check that allowed her to quit her job and write full time for one year. Lee insisted their gift was to be a loan and eventually repaid them. In 1957, now writing full-time, Lee began a novel she entitled Go Set a Watchman, a title later changed to Atticus. She submitted her unsolicited manuscript to J. B. Lippincott, who gave her a several-thousand-dollar advance in October 1957 for the publishing rights. For the next year, Lee revised the novel with her Lippincott editor, Tay Hohoff. In 1958 after many revisions the manuscript had a new title, To Kill a Mockingbird, and its author became known as Harper Lee, rather than Nelle Lee (she feared her name would be mispronounced as “Nellie”).

Set during the 1930s, To Kill a Mockingbird, depicting oppression and exclusion in a closed southern community was published at a time when the United States was confronting the evils of racial discrimination. As with many authors, Harper Lee drew heavily on her own experiences in creating her coming-of-age novel. The Finch family of Maycomb—a family like the Lees of Monroeville, Alabama—differed from the predominant image of southern families in the first half of the 20th century, for the Lees and their fictional counterparts the Finches were liberal, well-educated, compassionate people aware of the suffering of others around them in the impoverished South of the 1930s.

In November 1959, while awaiting the novel’s galleys, Harper Lee accepted Truman Capote’s invitation to accompany him to Kansas as his research assistant. Capote had read about a family of four being murdered in their rural home; the New Yorker agreed to publish Capote’s investigative article, which eventually became his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1965), an exemplar of what literary critics have dubbed “New Journalism.” Charles Shields in his biography of Lee argues that she was instrumental in helping Capote obtain interviews and recording details about the Clutter family (163-164), who were brutally murdered. The recent film Capote (2005) depicts this period in Harper Lee’s life. Capote shows Lee, played by Catherine Keener, and Truman Capote, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, working together. According to Shields, Lee “was shocked” to receive no acknowledgment when In Cold Blood (1965) was published. Harper Lee’s only recognition was Capote’s brief dedication: “For Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee, with my love and gratitude” (Shields 253).

Many wonder why Lee has not produced another novel. Though Harper Lee and her only novel have continued to receive awards and accolades for more than 40 years, the author has refused to be a public figure; no other fictional works by Harper Lee have ever appeared. While Lee has never been clear about why she has not published again, in a 1964 interview with Roy Newquist, she described how overwhelming the experience of becoming famous was:

Well, I can’t say that it was one of surprise. It was one of sheer numbness. It was like being hit over the head and knocked cold. You see, 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.

Nelle Harper Lee continues to live a private life with her older sister in the family home in Monroeville, Alabama, with occasional stays in her New York apartment. A celebrity who refuses to act like one, Lee has led a quiet, unpublicized life since the late 1960s. It is doubtful that Nelle Harper Lee, at 80 years old, will give up her private persona. Nevertheless, she will always be recognized as a best-selling author who told the story of three children and one black man from South Alabama and made their experiences universal ones. They, as we, grow up in a world that is unjust and learn that to understand others different from us we must walk in their shoes— the advice Atticus gives Scout:

“First of all,” he said, “if you learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—”

“Sir?”
“—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Atticus’s lesson for Scout is still relevant more than 40 years later.