COUNTRY OF BIRTH

USA

INDUSTRY

Literature

TOP ACHIEVEMENTS

Harper Lee was an American writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mockingbird. The book has sold over 40 million copies to date and was adapted into an Academy Award winning movie. Lee achieved with one novel what many writers can only wish for in a lifetime.

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. She was the youngest of four children. Her father was a lawyer and member of the Alabama state legislature while it is believed that her mother may have had bipolar disorder, and she rarely left the house during Lee’s childhood. Lee’s interest in literature emerged while she was in high school. She attended the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery and then enrolled at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa to study law in 1945. She wrote for a college humor magazine, Rammer Jammer, and later became its editor. Lee spent the summer of her junior year at the University of Oxford in England as part of a student exchange program. Returning to her law studies that fall, Lee decided to drop out of university and move to New York.

EARLY CAREER

Lee arrived in New York City in 1950, aged 23. She worked first at a bookstore and then as an airline ticket agent for several years. In 1956, friends that she had made in New York offered to support her financially for a year so that she could write full time. Lee quit her job and dedicated herself to completing her first novel, Go Set a Watchman, which was submitted to a publisher in 1957. The book wasn't accepted. Lee revised the story, making the main character, a 26-year-old woman called Scout, into a child. She worked on the story for two years and it eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird.

ACHIEVEMENTS

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and was an overnight international success. Amongst other literary awards, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. One of the best loved and most taught classics of American literature, it has been translated into over 40 languages and has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide. A film version was made in 1962 and a Broadway play, adapted by Aaron Sorkin, appeared in 2018.

RECOGNITION

Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 and the National Medal of the Arts in 2010.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

• Lee's first manuscript, Go Set a Watchman, was thought to be lost until it was discovered in a safety deposit box in 2014. It was published by HarperCollins in July 2015.
• The 1962 movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird earned eight Academy Award nominations and won three of them.
• One of Lee’s closest childhood friends was another writer-to-be, Truman Capote, then known as Truman Persons. They shared a lifelong friendship.
• Lee died in her sleep on February 19, 2016, at the age of 89.