Harper Lee was born April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama as Nelle Harper Lee. Her father was a lawyer and was an Alabama legislator for twelve years. He defended two black men in a murder trial in 1919. After they were hanged, he never practiced law again. Lee studied law at several colleges, including the University of Alabama and Oxford, but never received a degree. She moved to New York City and was working as a clerk at an airline when she took a year off to write.
The result: To Kill a Mockingbird, her only novel, which was published in 1960, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, and was adapted into an Academy-Award winning film in 1962. Lee is said to have had difficulty with doing publicity for Mockingbird and was never able to write a second novel, although she did help childhood friend Truman Capote with his nonfiction book In Cold Blood. After Mockingbird, she rarely gave interviews, and when she did, it was under the express understanding that Mockingbird would not be discussed. Lee, 85, now reportedly lives in an assisted-living facility, blind and deaf, and losing memory.
Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 and was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.
Links:
HarperLee.com: Simple bio.
NNDB: Simple bio.
Biography.com: Special attention paid to her work on In Cold Blood.
Daily Mail: Gets more personal, looks closely at her silence and the culture of Monroeville.
Daily Telegraph: A lot about Harper's upbringing and early life.
