Biography of Harper Lee

Born in Monroeville, Alabama, on April 28, 1926, Nelle Harper Lee is the youngest of three children of Amassa Coleman Lee and Francis Lee.

Miss Lee received her early education in the Monroeville public schools. Following this, she entered the University of Alabama to study law, but left in 1950 without having completed the requirements for her law degree. She moved to New York and worked as an airline reservation clerk.

Her law studies proved to be good training for a writing career: they promote logical thinking, and legal cases are an excellent source of story ideas. After she came to New York, she approached a literary agent with a manuscript of two essays and three short stories. Miss Lee followed his suggestion that she expand one of the stories into a novel. This eventually became To Kill A Mockingbird.

Besides her prize-winning novel, Miss Lee has had several essays published. For example, "Christmas to Me" appeared in the December, 1961, issue of McCalls, and "Love - In other Words" appeared in the April 15, 1961, edition of Vogue. These essays display the same easy, sympathetic style of her novel.

To Kill A Mockingbird was on the bestseller lists for a period of over eighty weeks. Also the book was chosen as a Literary Guild selection; a Book-of-the-Month book; and a Reader's Digest Condensed Book. It was also published in paperback by Popular Library. In April, 1961, Miss Lee was awarded the Alabama Library Association Award. In May, 1961, she was the first woman since 1942 to win the The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.