mockingbird, a portrait of harper lee

Nelle Harper Lee was raised in the sleepy Alabama town of Monroeville during the Depression. She was a feisty tomboy with a mind of her own and the knuckles to back it up, and she wasn’t afraid to use them. When she met a neighbour boy named Truman, also a bit of a social misfit, the two of them discovered a shared love of stories and began to spend their time creating them on a used typewriter given to them by Lee’s lawyer father.

Truman Capote would grow up to write, with Lee’s unacknowledged assistance, the non-fiction novel In Cold Blood about the murder of an entire family in Kansas. Lee would drop out of law school and move to New York to write her novel about two children observing racial prejudice and intolerance in the American south. To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was made into an Academy Award-winning movie, starring Gregory Peck, in 1962.

Lee gave interviews until the mid 1960s, then took her considerable earnings from the book and movie and moved home to Monroeville a wealthy woman. Requests from reporters and other media for information of any kind about her life are routinely and vehemently denied; after the initial flurry of public interest in the wake of the book’s publication and the success of the movie, Lee found interviews repetitive and boring, and decided to have nothing more to do with them. In spite of being Monroeville’s literary celebrity, she lives as just another elderly lady in a small community, going out for tea with her older sister and avoiding the limelight.

Having written one of the most famous and controversial novels of the 20th century, Harper Lee disappeared from the public eye. “How come you never wrote another?” she was asked. She replied simply, “I said what I had to say."

Charles J. Shields has written the only existing biography of Harper Lee. An excerpt from it can be found at his website: http://www.charlesjshields.com/content/book.asp