Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, on April 28, 1926, the daughter of A. C. Lee, a former newspaper editor and lawyer who served in the Alabama legislature. She spent a year at Huntingdon College, studied law at the University of Alabama and left one semester short of a degree.
In 1949 she moved to New York and worked in a bookstore, then took a job taking reservations for an airline. To Kill a Mockingbird came out on July 11, 1960, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and became a film in 1962. She died in her sleep in Monroeville on February 19, 2016, at eighty-nine.
The story of that book is a story about revision, and about an editor who saw what a writer had before the writer did. It’s also a story about credit, fame and silence. Lee wrote one great novel, helped write a famous piece of nonfiction that never gave her proper credit, and spent the rest of her life refusing to be the public figure the first book made her.
How did a Christmas gift let Harper Lee write To Kill a Mockingbird?
In December 1956 her friends Michael and Joy Brown gave her a present at their townhouse on East 50th Street: enough money to cover a year’s wages, and a note.
“You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”
She quit the airline job. In January 1957 she wrote the manuscript that would become Go Set a Watchman, and in October of that year she sold it to J. B. Lippincott. Without the gift there’s no evidence she’d have found the time. Without the next three years, nobody would know her name.
Patronage of that kind is rare now and wasn’t common then. Most writers buy their time the hard way, with early mornings and unpaid weekends, and a year of paid freedom doesn’t guarantee a book. Lee used hers.
What did Tay Hohoff see in Harper Lee’s first draft?
A problem and a solution. Hohoff, her editor at Lippincott, found the manuscript to be more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel. It followed Jean Louise Finch, twenty-six, coming home to Maycomb from New York, and the parts that worked were the flashbacks to her childhood as Scout.
So Hohoff asked Lee to write a new novel out of the flashbacks.
Over about two years she guided Lee through draft after draft. Lee later called it a long and hopeless period of writing the book over and over again. One winter night she threw the manuscript out into the snow and phoned Hohoff in tears, and Hohoff told her to go outside and pick up the pages. She did, and kept going.
The book that came out of that process is shorter, tighter and told from inside a child’s head, with an adult’s hindsight laid over it. That double vision makes the voice work. Scout sees everything and understands half of it, and the grown woman telling the story knows the rest and holds most of it back.
Hohoff’s note is the kind a professional editor earns a fee for. She didn’t fix sentences. She found the living part of a dead book and told the writer to throw the rest away.
Is Go Set a Watchman a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird?
No, though it was sold as one. It’s the 1957 manuscript, the draft Hohoff read and sent back.
The manuscript resurfaced in Monroeville in 2014, and HarperCollins published it on July 14, 2015, to enormous preorders. Readers who opened it expecting more Scout found an adult Jean Louise and an Atticus who attends a Citizens’ Council meeting and opposes federal intervention in the South. Many were shocked. A former Lippincott editor said neither Lee nor Hohoff had ever meant it for publication, and Alabama officials looked into claims that Lee, then in her late eighties, had been pressured, and found them unfounded.
Read as a first draft, Watchman is a gift to anyone who writes. You can see the raw material, the characters before revision softened and sharpened them, and the flashbacks Hohoff spotted. Read as a sequel, it’s a confusing book about a man readers thought they knew.
How much of To Kill a Mockingbird came from Monroeville?
A great deal. Maycomb is Monroeville with the name changed, and Finch was her mother’s maiden name.
Scout resembles Lee herself at that age, a tomboy in overalls in a town that wanted her in a dress.
A. C. Lee had once defended two Black men accused of killing a white storekeeper, and both were hanged. His daughter watched trials as a child. The courtroom, the lawyer father and the town’s habits all come out of her own childhood.
The town knew it, and the book still belongs to Monroeville in ways that weren’t always comfortable for her. In 2013 Lee sued the Monroe County Heritage Museum over souvenirs it sold with the novel’s themes, and the fight dragged on into 2014 before the case was dismissed. A writer who drew a whole book from her hometown spent her last years arguing with it over who owned the result.
Dill came from next door. Truman Capote lived next door to the Lees as a boy, and the two of them shared an old Underwood typewriter her father gave them. His biographer Gerald Clarke summed them up: “Nelle was too rough for most other girls, and Truman was too soft for most other boys.” Capote returned the favor by putting a tomboy much like her into his own first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms.
How does To Kill a Mockingbird set up Boo Radley?
With small objects, planted early and paid off late.
Gifts turn up in the knothole of an oak on the Radley place: gum, pennies, two figures carved from soap, a watch. Jem’s torn pants, left on the Radley fence after a night raid, come back mended and folded. During the fire at Miss Maudie’s house, somebody drapes a blanket over Scout’s shoulders while she stands in the cold, and she never sees who.
Every one of those is a clue to who Boo is, and the children read them all wrong. I love a plot set up with small hints, and Lee’s are some of the cleanest in American fiction. When Boo finally steps out from behind the door at the end, the reader has had every piece of him for most of the book and hasn’t put them together. The surprise feels earned because nothing about it is new.
The fear the children feel and the man they find are two different things. Lee built that gap one object at a time.
She plants the ending in the first sentence, too. The novel opens: “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” It reads like a bit of family history, and for most of the book it is. Then, in the last chapters, a man attacks the children on a dark road home, Jem’s arm breaks, and Boo Radley carries him to the house. The whole novel turns out to be the long answer to how that arm got broken. A reader rarely notices the question was asked.
Harper Lee’s editor read her first draft, found the childhood flashbacks were the only part alive, and told her to write a new book out of them. That book was To Kill a Mockingbird.Share on X
Did Harper Lee help Truman Capote write In Cold Blood?
Yes, more than the book admits. In 1959 Capote invited her to Kansas to report on the murder of a farm family, and she went.
Kansans didn’t know what to make of Capote. Lee, a lawyer’s daughter from a small Southern town, knew how small-town people talked and what they’d tell a stranger, and she got doors open that he couldn’t. She wrote about 150 pages of notes and urged him to give the murdered family fuller characters, advice he didn’t take.
When In Cold Blood came out in 1966, she shared the dedication with Capote’s partner, and her work was credited as secretarial help. The friendship never recovered.
That kind of uncredited work is the daily reality of ghostwriting, and it’s fine when both sides agree to it in advance. It turns ugly when one side thinks it’s a collaboration and the other side thinks it’s assistance. Capote’s book needed her, and his acknowledgment didn’t say so.
Credit costs nothing to give. Capote kept it anyway, and lost a friend he’d had since childhood.
It also answers the old rumor that Capote wrote Mockingbird. The first time he saw her manuscript was in Kansas in 1959, finished and headed for the printer, and her prose sounds nothing like his. The film Capote puts her in the room for the reporting, and it gets that part right.
Why did Harper Lee stop publishing after To Kill a Mockingbird?
She never said in full, and the evidence points several ways.
Fame hit hard and fast. In 1964 she described it as “sheer numbness. It was like being hit over the head and knocked cold.” She’d hoped to become the Jane Austen of south Alabama, writing novel after novel about her corner of the world, and the size of the first book’s success made that harder.
She did keep working. In the late 1970s she took up the case of a rural Alabama preacher suspected of killing six people, including two of his wives, for insurance money, who was never convicted and was shot dead in 1977 at a funeral. She attended the trial of the man who shot him and collected the defense lawyer’s files for a book under the working title The Reverend. She never finished it. Casey Cep’s 2019 book Furious Hours tells that story and can’t say for certain why Lee gave up.
The novel never stopped selling. It has printed more than forty million copies and still sells close to a million a year. On November 5, 2007, George W. Bush gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She gave almost no interviews for the rest of her life.
Why do schools keep challenging To Kill a Mockingbird?
For reasons that have changed over sixty years. In 1966 the Hanover County school board in Virginia banned it as immoral literature. Lee wrote a scathing letter to the Richmond News Leader, and the board reversed itself.
Later challenges have objected to the racial slurs in the dialogue, and some readers object to a book about racism told entirely through white eyes, where Tom Robinson, the man on trial for his life, gets few lines and little inner life. Both complaints describe real features of the book. The American Library Association ranked it twenty-first on its list of the most challenged books of 2000 to 2009, and it shows up again nearly every year during Banned Books Week.
The fair verdict is that the book does one thing superbly and leaves another undone. It shows a white child learning what her town is. It doesn’t show what that town was like for the Black families living in it, and it doesn’t try.
How should you mark Harper Lee Day?
Reread To Kill a Mockingbird and track Boo Radley’s gifts as they arrive. Then read the first chapters of Go Set a Watchman and look for the scenes Hohoff saw. You’ll find the novel inside the draft. Then watch the 1962 film, with Horton Foote’s script and Gregory Peck’s Oscar-winning Atticus, and notice what a screenplay has to cut from a book narrated by a child.
If you write, go through your own manuscript and mark the pages that feel alive. Ask whether the book should be about them.
Lee wrote one novel that mattered, and she wrote it because an editor wouldn’t let her settle for the first draft. For more author birthdays, the full set is on the literary holidays calendar. If your draft has good scenes and no spine, book coaching is where I help writers find the book inside it.