Harper Lee

Harper Lee Biography
Born Nelle Harper Lee
(1926–)

Writer. Born Nelle Harper Lee on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. Lee Harper is best known for writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—her one and only novel. The youngest of four children, she grew up as a tomboy in a small town. Her father was a lawyer, a member of the Alabama state legislature, and also owned part of the local newspaper. For most of Lee’s life, her mother suffered from mental illness, rarely leaving the house. It is believed that she may have had bipolar disorder.One of her closest childhood friends was another writer-to-be, Truman Capote (then known as Truman Persons). Tougher than many of the boys, Lee often stepped up to serve as Truman’s protector. Truman, who shared few interests with boys his age, was picked on for being a sissy and for the fancy clothes he wore. While the two friends were very different, they both shared in having difficult home lives. Truman was living with his mother’s relatives in town after largely being abandoned by his own parents.
In high school, Lee developed an interest in English literature. After graduating in 1944, she went to the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery. Lee stood apart from the other students—she could have cared less about fashion, makeup, or dating. Instead, she focused on her studies and on her writing. Lee was a member of the literary honor society and the glee club.
Transferring to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, Lee was known for being a loner and an individualist. She did make a greater attempt at a social life there, joining a sorority for a while. Pursuing her interest in writing, Lee contributed to the school’s newspaper and its humor magazine, the Rammer Jammer. She eventually became the editor of the Rammer Jammer. In her junior year, Lee was accepted into the university’s law school, which allowed students to work on law degrees while still undergraduates. The demands of her law studies forced her to leave her post as editor of the Rammer Jammer. After her first year in the law program, Lee began expressing to her family that writing—not the law—was her true calling. She went to Oxford University in England that summer as an exchange student. Returning to her law studies that fall, Lee dropped out after the first semester. She soon moved to New York City to follow her dreams to become a writer.
In 1949, a 23-year-old Lee arrived in New York City. She struggled for several years, working as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines and for the British Overseas Air Corp (BOAC). While in the city, Lee was reunited with old friend Truman Capote, one of the literary rising stars of the time. She also befriended Broadway composer and lyricist Michael Martin Brown and his wife Joy.
In 1956, the Browns gave Lee an impressive Christmas present—to support her for a year so that she could write full time. She quit her job and devoted herself to her craft. The Browns also helped her find an agent, Maurice Crain. He, in turn, was able to get the publishing firm interested in her first novel, which was first titled Go Set a Watchman, then Atticus, and later To Kill a Mockingbird. Working with editor Tay Hohoff, Lee finished the manuscript in 1959. Later that year, Lee joined forces with old friend Truman Capote to assist him with an article he was writing for The New Yorker. Capote was writing about the impact of the murder of four members of the Clutter family on their small Kansas farming community. The two traveled to Kansas to interview townspeople, friends and family of the deceased, and the investigators working to solve the crime. Serving as his research assistant, Lee helped with the interviews, eventually winning over some of the locals with her easy-going, unpretentious manner. Truman, with his flamboyant personality and style, also had a hard time initially getting himself into his subjects’ good graces.
During their time in Kansas, the Cutters’s suspected killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were caught in Las Vegas and brought back for questioning. Lee and Capote got a chance to interview the suspects not long after their arraignment in January 1960. Soon after, Lee and Capote returned to New York. She worked on the galleys for her forthcoming first novel while he started working on his article, which would evolve into the nonfiction masterpiece, In Cold Blood. The pair returned to Kansas in March for the murder trial. Later that spring, Lee gave Capote all of her notes on the crime, the victims, the killers, the local communities, and much more.
 
Soon Lee was engrossed her literary success story. In July 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was published and picked up by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild. A condensed version of the story appeared in Reader’s Digest magazine. The work’s central character, a young girl nicknamed Scout, was not unlike Lee in her youth. In one of the book’s major plotlines, Scout and her brother Jem and their friend Dill explore their fascination with a mysterious and somewhat infamous neighborhood character named Boo Radley. But the work was more than a coming-of-age story, however. Another part of the novel reflected racial prejudices in the South. Their attorney father, Atticus Finch, tries to help a black man who has been charged with raping a white woman to get a fair trial and to prevent him from being lynched by angry whites in a small town.
The following year, To Kill a Mockingbird won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and several other literary awards. Horton Foote wrote a screenplay based on the book and used the same title for the 1962 film adaptation. Lee visited the set during filming and did a lot of interviews to support the film. Earning eight Academy Award nominations, the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird won four awards, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch. The character of Atticus is said to have been based on Lee’s father. By the mid-1960s, Lee was reportedly working on a second novel, but it was never published. Continuing to help Capote, Lee worked with him on and off on In Cold Blood. She had been invited by Smith and Hickock to witness their execution in 1965, but she declined. When Capote’s book was finally published in 1966, a rift developed between the two friends and collaborators. Capote dedicated to the book to Lee and his longtime lover Jack Dunphy, but he failed to acknowledge her contributions to the work. While Lee was very angry and hurt by this betrayal, she remained friends with Truman for the rest of his life.
That same year, Lee had an operation on her hand to repair damage done by a bad burn. She also accepted a post on the National Council of the Arts at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson. During the 1970s and 1980s, Lee largely retreated from public life. She spent some of her time on a nonfiction book project about an Alabama serial killer, which had the working title The Reverend. But the work was never published.
Lee continues to live a quiet, private life in New York City and Monroeville. Active in her church and community, she usually avoids anything to do with her still popular novel.
Harper Lee

Harper Lee's reputation as an author rests on her only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). An enormous popular success, the book was selected for distribution by the Literary Guild and the Book-of-the-Month Club and was published in a shortened version as a Reader's Digest condensed book. It was also made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1962. Moreover, the critically acclaimed novel won, among other awards, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1961), the Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (1961), and Bestsellers's Paperback of the Year Award (1962).
Although Lee stresses that To Kill a Mockingbird is not autobiographical, she allows that a writer "should write about what he knows and write truthfully." The time period and setting of the novel obviously originate in the author's experience as the youngest of three children born to lawyer Amasa Coleman Lee (related to Robert E. Lee) and Frances Finch Lee. The family lived in the small town of Monroeville, Alabama. After graduating from Monroeville's public schools, Lee spent a year (1944-1945) at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, and then attended the University of Alabama for four years (1945-1949), including a year as an exchange student at Oxford University. While she was a student at the University of Alabama, her satires, editorial columns, and reviews appeared in campus publications. She left the University of Alabama in 1950, six months short of a law degree, to pursue a writing career in New York City.
Living in New York in the early 1950s and supporting herself by working as an airline reservations clerk, she approached a literary agent with the manuscripts of two essays and three short stories. The agent encouraged her to expand one of the stories into a novel which later became To Kill a Mockingbird. With the financial help of friends, she gave up her job and moved into a cold-water flat where she devoted herself to her writing. Although her father became ill and she was forced to divide her time between New York and Monroeville, she continued to work on her novel. She submitted a manuscript to Lippincott in 1957. While editors criticized the book's structure, suggesting it seemed to be a series of short stories strung together, they recognized the novel's promise and encouraged Lee to rewrite it. With the help of her editor, Tay Hohoff, Lee reworked the material, and To Kill a Mockingbird was finally published in July 1960.
To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, a woman recollecting her childhood years between six and nine. Scout lives with her brother, Jem, four years older than she, and her lawyer father, Atticus, in the small Alabama town of Maycomb during the 1930s. During the three years covered by the novel, Scout and Jem gain a better understanding of the adult world.
A key incident in their maturing is Atticus's legal defense of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white girl named Mayella Ewell, daughter of evil Bob Ewell. In the months preceding the trial, Scout and Jem suffer the taunts of classmates and neighbors who object to Atticus's "lawing for niggers." As the trial nears, the situation intensifies, and a threatened lynching of Robinson is narrowly averted by the innocent intervention of Jem and Scout. In a climactic scene, the jury finds Robinson guilty even though Atticus has clearly proven him innocent. Maycomb's racial prejudice is so engrained that Atticus cannot influence the verdict of people reared to believe "that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around . . . white women."
Another major interest in the novel is the unraveling of the mystery surrounding the neighborhood recluse, Arthur "Boo" Radley, who has remained secluded in the Radley house since he was arrested many years before for some teenage pranks and then released in his father's custody. Initially a victim of his father's uncompromising religion and family pride, Boo gradually becomes a victim of community prejudice, feared by adults and children alike. When Jem and Scout befriend Dill, a little boy who spends summers in Maycomb with his aunt, the three devote themselves to Dill's ideas for making Boo come out. At first the children imagine that the recluse dines on raw squirrels and roams the neighborhood by night. But finally they learn that Boo is truly a friend who has done a number of kind deeds for them. He hides gifts for the children in a hollow tree. He secretly mends Jem's torn pants, which were badly snagged on the Radleys' fence and abandoned there by the boy during an attempt to spy on Boo. Boo leaves them on the fence for Jem to retrieve. One cold winter night, while Scout stands shivering near the Radleys' steps as she watches a neighbor's house burn, Boo, unseen, covers her with a blanket. It is also Boo who rescues Scout and Jem from the murderous attack of drunken, vengeful Bob Ewell.
To Kill a Mockingbird contains a number of complex and opposing themes in a deceptively simple narrative—ignorance-knowledge, cowardice-heroism, guilt-innocence, and prejudice (persecution)-tolerance. The ignorance-knowledge theme is developed through characterization and action. Lee believes that children are born with an instinct for truth and justice. Their education, which is the result of observing the behavior of the adults around them, can nurture or destroy their intrinsic goodness. Fortunately, the Finch children have Atticus to provide the true education which the Maycomb school fails to provide. Structuring the action around the Boo Radley mystery and Robinson's trial gradually reveals the truth and further develops the ignorance-knowledge theme.
The character most central to the development of the cowardice-heroism theme is Atticus Finch; in counterpoint to Atticus's courage is the bullying cowardice of Bob Ewell. In part one of the novel, the children begin to think of their father as a hero when they see him shoot a rabid dog and learn for the first time that he was once "the deadest shot in Maycomb County." Atticus reforms the children's definition of courage when he has Jem read to Mrs. Dubose, a former drug addict, after school. The day after she dies, he tells Jem about her victory over morphine: "I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what." In part two of the novel, Atticus fulfills this definition of courage in defending Tom Robinson.
The themes of guilt-innocence and prejudice (persecution)-tolerance are closely related in the novel. The characters who are innocent—Tom Robinson and Boo Radley—are judged guilty by a prejudiced society. Tom is killed trying to escape from prison, but the novel expresses hope that prejudice will be overcome. Jem sheds tears at the end of the trial and vows to combat racial injustice. However, the climax of the trial is melodramatic, and the narrative flounders when characters mouth pious speeches against prejudice.
Lee's use of symbol is masterful. The mockingbird closely associated with Boo Radley and Tom Robinson represents joy and innocence. Both Atticus and Miss Maudie Atkinson, an optimistic neighbor, tell the children that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, because "mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy"; thus, Lee emphasizes how both Radley and Robinson are unjustly persecuted as innocent victims. When Maycomb has a light snowfall for the first time in years, Jem builds a snowman underlaid with mud to give it sufficient substance. The snowman melts when Miss Maudie's house burns. Thus, in a day the snowman's color goes from black to white and from white to black, showing how superficial skin color is.
When To Kill a Mockingbird appeared in 1960, its critical reception was mixed. R. W. Henderson called it "a compassionate, deeply moving novel, and a most persuasive plea for racial justice"; others praised Lee's "insight into Southern mores" and her "wit, grace, and skill." Negative comments were made about the novel's sermonizing and its melodramatic climax. Some critics found fault with the point of view. In Atlantic Phoebe Adams, missing the point that the action of the novel is recollected by Scout, found the story "frankly and completely impossible, being told in the first person by a six-year-old girl, with the prose style of a well-educated adult." Granville Hicks noted in Saturday Review that "Miss Lee's problem has been to tell the story she wants to tell and yet to stay within the consciousness of a child, and she hasn't consistently solved it."
Scholarly articles in the 1970s praise the novel's technical excellence and recognize its place in literary tradition. R. A. Dave notes that in creating the small world of Maycomb, Lee has made "an epic canvas against which is enacted a movingly human drama of the jostling worlds—of children and adults, of innocence and experience, of kindness and cruelty, of love and hatred, of humor and pathos, and above all of appearance and reality—all taking the reader to the root of human behavior." Fred Erisman in "The Romantic Regionalism of Harper Lee" notes Lee's awareness of traditional southern romanticism and its pervasive influence on the South, but suggests that she sees the beginning of a new type of romanticism, "the more reasonable, pragmatic, and native romanticism of a Ralph Waldo Emerson."
With the novel's dramatic success, articles and interviews about Lee appeared in leading periodicals. The author of a 1961 Newsweek interview suggests that Lee "strongly calls to mind the impish tomboy who narrates her novel. There is a faint touch of gray in her Italian boy haircut and a heavy touch of Alabama in her accent." In interviews Lee's quick wit serves to protect her privacy. She describes herself as a Whig ("I believe in Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Corn Laws") and quotes as her favorite fan letter one which accuses her of playing down the serious problem of the rape of white women ("Why is it that you young Jewish authors seek to whitewash the situation?"); she fabricated a clever response signed "Harper Levy."
She does, however, speak seriously in interviews about her reading tastes and her work habits. She numbers among her favorite authors Charles Lamb, Robert Louis Stevenson ("the old gentlemen"), Jane Austen ("writing, cameo-like, in that little corner of the world of hers and making it universal"), and Thomas Love Peacock, as well as various religious memorialists of the nineteenth century. Describing herself as a "journeyman writer," she notes that "writing is the hardest thing in the world, . . . but writing is the only thing that has made me completely happy." Since 1961 she has lived in Monroeville, supposedly working on her second novel with a southern setting.
The reading public and the critics have eagerly awaited more of Lee's writing, but in the last twenty-five years no books have followed her best-seller, upon which her reputation rests. In 1961 two short articles, "Christmas to Me" and "Love—In Other Words," appeared in popular magazines. Although she travels extensively, Monroeville, where her sister Alice Lee practices law, remains home. Harper Lee's contribution to American literature is important, based on To Kill a Mockingbird, a regional novel with a universal message, for it combines popular appeal with literary excellence.

Website Power Points
static.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/gems/hhiggins/GreatDepression.ppt
http://www.hamptonhigh.ca/stackhouse/documents/Microsoft%20PowerPoint%20-%20To%20Kill%20a%20Mockingbird%20-%20Intro1to15.pdf
http://www.nebo.edu/misc/learning_resources/ppt/6-12/kill_a_mockingbird.ppt

Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY4MgWT0n0M (Introduction)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JikIps4F6JM (Top 10 questions)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78NSBEIiqBo (Characters)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lU6UC0a50k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFFCFRvYURo (Themes)