Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist born in Monroeville, Alabama, in 1926 and died in the same town in 2016. She wrote in English within the literary tradition of the Deep South, and her name became linked to a single novel published during her lifetime, which made her one of the most recognised voices in twentieth-century American fiction.

She grew up in a family of four children. Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, had been a newspaper editor, businessman and lawyer, and served in the Alabama legislature from 1926 to 1938. Lee attended Monroe County High School, where her interest in English literature was encouraged by her teacher Gladys Watson. After a year at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, she transferred to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she studied law for several years without completing her degree. She wrote for the student newspaper and a humour magazine, and in 1948 attended a summer programme at Oxford University.

In the late 1940s she settled in New York, working for an airline while writing in her free time. After the deaths of her mother and brother in 1951, she kept close ties with her family in Alabama. In 1956 friends gave her a year's wages so she could devote herself to writing, and during that period she worked on what became To Kill a Mockingbird. The earlier manuscript, now published as Go Set a Watchman, was reshaped at Lippincott by editor Tay Hohoff, who guided Lee through two years of revisions until the book reached its final form.

The novel appeared in 1960 and was an immediate success. Its story, told through the eyes of a young girl in Alabama, follows her lawyer father as he defends a Black man wrongly accused of rape in the 1930s. Lee combined a child's memory with a sharp view of racism and social convention in the South. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 and became a staple of school reading lists. The 1962 film adaptation, directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Gregory Peck, won three Academy Awards.

From then on Lee avoided public attention and gave few interviews. Her intense childhood friendship with Truman Capote gradually cooled, though she helped him research In Cold Blood. After decades in New York she returned to Monroeville for health reasons. In 2015 Go Set a Watchman was published, an early draft that renewed interest in her and in the tensions between her work and its time. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.

Her legacy rests on a novel that has reached a very wide readership and continues to be debated for its treatment of race, childhood and the role of the white lawyer. Her case also shows how a book can be shaped by its editing and how a writer's private life can become part of the public story.