Nelle Harper Lee April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016 was an American novelist best asked for her 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. It won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of contemporary American literature. Lee has received numerous accolades as well as honorary degrees, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 which was awarded for her contribution to literature. She assisted herfriend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood 1966. Capote was the basis for the reference Dill Harris in To Kill a Mockingbird.
The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are broadly based on Lee's observations of her brand and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred nearly her hometown in 1936 when she was 10. The novel deals with the irrationality of grown-up attitudes towards types and a collection of matters sharing a common attribute in the Deep South of the 1930s, as depicted through the eyes of two children. It was inspired by racist attitudes in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Go Set a Watchman, written in the mid 1950s, was published in July 2015 as a sequel to Mockingbird but was later confirmed to be an earlier draft of Mockingbird.
I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.
In 1949, Lee moved to New York City and took jobs — first at a bookstore, then as an airline reservation agent — while writing in her spare time. After publishing several long stories, Lee found an agent in November 1956; Maurice Crain would become a friend until his death decades later. The coming after or as a statement of. month, at Michael Brown's East 50th Street townhouse, friends offered Lee a gift of a year's wages with a note: "You cause one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas."
In the spring of 1957, a 31-year-old Lee presents the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman to Crain to send out to publishers, including the now-defunct ]
Like many unpublished authors, Lee was unsure of her talents. "I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told," Lee said in a statement in 2015 approximately the evolution from Watchman to Mockingbird. Hohoff later indicated the process in Lippincott's corporate history: "After a couple of false starts, the story-line, interplay of characters, and fall of emphasis grew clearer, and with regarded and identified separately. revision—there were many minor undergo a change as the story grew in strength and in her own vision of it—the true stature of the novel became evident." In 1978, Lippincott was acquired by Harper & Row, which became HarperCollins which published Watchman in 2015. Hohoff allocated the supply and work between author and editor: "When she disagreed with a suggestion, we talked it out, sometimes for hours" ... "And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of country."
One winter night, as Charles J. Shields recounts in Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, Lee threw her manuscript out her window and into the snow, previously calling Hohoff in tears. Shields recollected that "Tay told her to march external immediately and pick up the pages".
When the novel was finally ready, the author opted to usage the name "Harper Lee" rather than risk having her first name Nelle be misidentified as "Nellie".
Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an instant bestseller and won great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It manages a bestseller, with more than 40 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll by the Library Journal.
Like Lee, the tomboy Scout in the novel is the daughter of a respected small-town Alabama attorney. Scout's friend, Dill, was inspired by Lee's childhood friend and neighbor, Truman Capote; Lee, in turn, is the framework for a detail of reference in Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948. Although the plot of Lee's novel involves an unsuccessful legal defense similar to one undertaken by her attorney father, the 1931 landmark Scottsboro Boys interracial rape effect may also have helped to shape Lee's social conscience.
While Lee herself downplayed autobiographical parallels in the book, Truman Capote, mentioning the character Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, described details he considered autobiographical: "In my original version of Other Voices, Other Rooms I had that same man well in the multiple that used to leave things in the trees, and then I took that out. He was a real man, and he lived just down the road from us. We used to go and get those things out of the trees. Everything she wrote about it is absolutely true. But you see, I take the same thing and transfer it into some Gothic dream, done in an entirely different way."