(Nelle) Harper Lee - Career, After To Kill a Mockingbird, Fictional portrayals

Writer, born in Monroeville, Alabama, USA. She attended Huntington College (1944–5), studied law at the University of Alabama (1945–9), and attended Oxford University for one year. She was an airline reservation clerk in New York City during the 1950s before returning to Monroeville. Her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), received critical acclaim and was made into a highly successful film in 1962.

Nelle Harper Lee (born April 28, 1926) is an American novelist, best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

Born in Monroeville, Alabama, Lee is the youngest of the four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Finch Lee.

Career

To Kill a Mockingbird

With a handful of long stories, she located an agent in November, 1956. Lippincott editor Tay Hohoff, she completed To Kill a Mockingbird in the summer of 1959. Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate bestseller and won her great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.

Many details of To Kill A Mockingbird are apparently autobiographical. Like Lee, the tomboy Scout is the daughter of a respected small town Alabama attorney. The plot involves a legal case, the mechanics of which would have been familiar to Lee, who studied law. Scout's friend Dill is commonly supposed to have been inspired by Lee's childhood friend and neighbor, Truman Capote -- while Lee is the model for a character in Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Though Lee has downplayed autobiographical parallels, biographer Charles Shields cites them as evidence against the persistent theory that Capote wrote all or part of To Kill a Mockingbird, a rumor which Capote himself occasionally allowed to pass without comment but dismissed at other times. Mentioning the character Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, Capote described the differences in his and Lee's writing styles:

In my original version of Other Voices, Other Rooms I had that same man living in the house that used to leave things in the trees, and then I took that out. 223.)

Citing her failure to produce another novel, at least one notable critic, Harper's editor Pearl Kazin Bell, has gone on record supporting the theory of Capote's co-authorship. In it he indicates that he had seen Lee's manuscript but did not take any credit for it.

Lee was overwhelmed with the immediate success of her first book. In a conversation with Roy Newquist for his book Counterpoint (1964), she revealed her reaction:

I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird.

—Harper Lee, quoted in Newquist—1964

After To Kill a Mockingbird

Immediately after completing To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee accompanied her childhood friend Truman Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to assist Capote in researching what they thought would be an article on a small town's response to the murder of a farmer and his family. The experiences of Capote and Lee in Holcomb were depicted in two different films.

Since the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee has granted almost no requests for interviews or public appearances, and with the exception of a few short essays, has published no further writings.

Lee said of the 1962 Academy Award-winning screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird by Horton Foote: "If the integrity of a film adaptation can be measured by the degree to which the novelist's intent is preserved, Mr. Foote's screenplay should be studied as a classic."

In June 1966, Lee was one of two persons named by President Lyndon B. In the same year, on November 28, Capote held his Black and White Ball in honor of Katharine Graham. The 480 invitations included one to Lee.

When Lee attended the 1983 Alabama History and Heritage Festival in Eufaula, Alabama, she presented the essay Romance and High Adventure.

Lee has been known to split time between an apartment in New York and her sister's home in Monroeville. At the urging of Peck's widow Veronique, Lee traveled by train from Monroeville to Los Angeles in 2005 to accept the Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award.

Her withdrawal from public life has prompted persistent but unfounded speculation that new publications are in the works.

In a letter published in Oprah Winfrey's magazine O (June 2006), Lee wrote about her early reception of books as a child and her steadfast dedication to the written word: "Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books."

Fictional portrayals

Harper Lee was portrayed by Catherine Keener in the film Capote (2005), by Sandra Bullock in the film Infamous (2006) and by Tracey Hoyt in the TV movie Scandalous Me: The Jacqueline Susann Story (1998). In Other Voices, Other Rooms (1995), the character of Idabell Thompkins (Aubrey Dollar) is inspired by Truman Capote's memories of Harper Lee as a child.