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| Harper Lee in Stockton, Alabama in August 2001 |
Harper Lee: The Story of Her Life and Extraordinary Career
What were the events that shaped the great writer, and what did she do after To Kill A Mockingbird?
1926
On April 18, Nelle Harper Lee is born in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of lawyer Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch's five children. Her middle name was taken from Dr William Harper, who tended to Frances during a breakdown.
1932
Aged six, Lee meets Truman Streckfus Persons, who was sent to live with relatives in Monroeville. Precocious, and with a love of reading, the schoolfriends bond instantly. Truman would go on to adopt a pen name, Truman Capote.
1944
Lee joined the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, following in the footsteps of her sister Alice, who had worked in their father's law firm during the Great Depression.
1945
Lee transferred to the University of Alabama, where she embarked on a law degree. Although she didn't enjoy her subject, Lee took great pleasure in writing for the student newspaper and humour magazine.
1949
A summer at Oxford University wasn't enough to cure Lee's dislike of law. Spurred on by Capote's published autobiography, which features a character based on her, Lee moved to New York City to pursue a career as a writer. Her father, who had been funding her education, said she would have to support herself.
1950
Lee's writing career got pushed to the side as she worked for Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways Corporation behind the reservation desks.
1956
Lee had, however, managed to write a few longer stories and had spent her first years in New York with Capote and his literary friends. Two of them, Broadway lyricist Michael Martin Brown and his wife Joy introduced her to Maurice Crain, an agent. That December they clubbed together for her gift: a year's wages with the note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas". She would later call the gesture a "full, fair chance for a new life".
A manuscript was picked up by editor Tay Hohoff at agency JB Lippincott & Co. This was Go Set a Watchman, a story about an adult named Scout, who returned in the mid-Fifties to her childhood home to visit her father, Atticus. Hohoff persuaded Lee to write a new novel from the perspective of Scout as a child. Two years later, it became To Kill a Mockingbird.
1958
Suffering frustration and writer's block, Lee threw a draft of her manuscript out of her New York apartment window and into the snow, before calling Hohoff. Hohoff tells her to retrieve them, immediately. The novel was finished shortly afterwards and Lee decided to use the pen name Harper Lee, rather than Nelle, to avoid being mistaken for Nellie.
1959
Lee travelled with Capote to Holcomb Kansas, where they research a story about the murder of a farming family. Their work would eventually become In Cold Blood.
1960
To Kill a Mockingbird is published on July 11, 1960, and becomes an instant bestseller in a time when the Civil Rights movement was in full swing.
1961
Lee wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, aged 35.
1962
Lee's father dies, but not before meeting Gregory Peck, who plays him in the screen adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, which is released on Christmas Day. At a press conference for the film, Lee told journalists that she was scared by the prospect of a second novel.
1966
Capote and Lee's friendship fades after In Cold Blood is published and, flushed with newly found literary fame, he moves into more glamorous circles. At the same time, Lee began the reclusive journey which she will continue into old age.
However, she remained vocal on social issues famously writing a letter to a county school board in Virginia that tried to remove all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird after deeming it "immoral." The letter read: "Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that “To Kill a Mockingbird” spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners."
In the envelope, she enclosed "a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice."
In the same year, Lee was appointed to the National Council on the Arts by President Lyndon B Johnson.
1984
Capote died aged 59.
1999
To Kill a Mockingbird is voted the best novel of the 20th century by the Library Journal.
2006
Lee's writing appears in the spotlight again after her open letter is published in Oprah Winfrey's O magazine. Her opinions on the value of books over technology resonated with readers: "[In] an abundant society where people have laptops, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me: I still prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.
"And Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up - some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal."
2007
In May, Lee is inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters. Later, in November, George W Bush presented Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom - a rare public appearance from her. Weeks later, Lee suffered a stroke which left her wheelchair-bound, absent-minded and largely deaf and blind. She sold the Upper East side apartment in which she had been living, largely anonymously, for decades and moved back to Monroeville, into an assisted-living facility. Her older sister Alice, then 95 and still practising law, helped her cope with her fame after she returned to her hometown.
2013
Lee recovered from her illness, filed a lawsuit to regain the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird from a son-in-law of her former literary agent, claiming the man "engaged in a scheme to dupe" her out of the rights to her book when hearing and eyesight were in decline. A settlement was reached in September.
2014
Alice Lee died in November, aged 103.
2015
Lee published a second novel in July, Go Set a Watchman. Lee described the book not as "a sequel" but as "the parent" to her immortal classic To Kill a Mockingbird.
2016
Harper Lee died on February 18, 2016, aged 89.
1962
Lee's father dies, but not before meeting Gregory Peck, who plays him in the screen adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, which is released on Christmas Day. At a press conference for the film, Lee told journalists that she was scared by the prospect of a second novel.
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| On the set of the film version of To Kill A Mockingbird with Mary Badham, who played Scout, in 1962 |
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| Gregory Peck and Harper Lee on the set of the film. They became friends and Peck's grandson was named after her. |
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| Lee with her lawyer father, Amasa Coleman Lee, at home in Alabama in 1961 |
1966
Capote and Lee's friendship fades after In Cold Blood is published and, flushed with newly found literary fame, he moves into more glamorous circles. At the same time, Lee began the reclusive journey which she will continue into old age.
 |
| Lee sits with childhood friend Truman Capote, as he signs copies of his book In Cold Blood in 1966 |
However, she remained vocal on social issues famously writing a letter to a county school board in Virginia that tried to remove all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird after deeming it "immoral." The letter read: "Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that “To Kill a Mockingbird” spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners."
In the envelope, she enclosed "a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice."
In the same year, Lee was appointed to the National Council on the Arts by President Lyndon B Johnson.
1984
Capote died aged 59.
1999
To Kill a Mockingbird is voted the best novel of the 20th century by the Library Journal.
2006
Lee's writing appears in the spotlight again after her open letter is published in Oprah Winfrey's O magazine. Her opinions on the value of books over technology resonated with readers: "[In] an abundant society where people have laptops, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me: I still prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.
"And Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up - some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal."
2007
In May, Lee is inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters. Later, in November, George W Bush presented Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom - a rare public appearance from her. Weeks later, Lee suffered a stroke which left her wheelchair-bound, absent-minded and largely deaf and blind. She sold the Upper East side apartment in which she had been living, largely anonymously, for decades and moved back to Monroeville, into an assisted-living facility. Her older sister Alice, then 95 and still practising law, helped her cope with her fame after she returned to her hometown.
2013
Lee recovered from her illness, filed a lawsuit to regain the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird from a son-in-law of her former literary agent, claiming the man "engaged in a scheme to dupe" her out of the rights to her book when hearing and eyesight were in decline. A settlement was reached in September.
2014
Alice Lee died in November, aged 103.
2015
Lee published a second novel in July, Go Set a Watchman. Lee described the book not as "a sequel" but as "the parent" to her immortal classic To Kill a Mockingbird.
2016
Harper Lee died on February 18, 2016, aged 89.
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