Celebrating the novelist who gave us To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee, remembered across the world for her beloved first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, passed away on Friday, Feb. 19, 2016, in Monroeville, Alabama.
Born Nelle Harper Lee on April 28, 1926, Lee was the youngest child of Amasa Coleman Lee, a prominent lawyer, and Frances Finch Lee. Lee was tough and spunky, spending more time in trees than in dresses—much like her eventual heroine, Scout. She spent her summers making up stories with her good friend Truman Parsons, who would later become the famed writer Truman Capote.
Lee went to Huntingdon College for one year before transferring to the University of Alabama to study law—mostly to please her father. She was soon a consistent contributor to the campus newspaper and humour magazine, of which she later became editor-in-chief. After a year on exchange at Oxford University, Lee was determined to move to New York and become a writer.
Keeping herself in rent with work at the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), Lee spent her days making bookings for travelers and her nights writing, hunched over a desk made from a door. Michael Brown, a lyricist whom Lee had met through Truman Capote, and his wife, Joy, believed deeply in Lee’s work, and gave her a most generous and important gift. For the Christmas of 1956, the Browns presented Lee with a cheque for one year’s salary at the BOAC and a note which read, “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please.”
Months later, Lee made her way to an agent with the first 50 pages of a manuscript entitled Go Set a Watchman. The pages told the story of a small-town lawyer who protects his client against an angry mob—an inciting incident for the novel which would eventually be edited and re-titled To Kill a Mockingbird.
The novel was published in 1960 and was met with instant success, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year. By the 1970s, To Kill a Mockingbird had sold nearly 10 million copies, and by 1988, it was being taught in 74 per cent of American secondary school classrooms.
“I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird,” Lee said in a 1964 radio interview. “I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers.”
In February 2015, a mere year before her death, the original manuscript of Go Set a Watchman was discovered by Lee’s lawyer, Tonja B. Carter. It told the story of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch 20 years on, as a young woman living in New York City and grappling with her past in southern Alabama. Though it was met with mixed reviews, Lee’s second novel was also an instant best-seller.
At 89, Lee is said to have died peacefully in her sleep at the Meadows, the assisted living facility where she had lived for the last several years.