Harper Lee Biography Essay

The Life of Harper Lee Harper Lee was an American author made famous by her Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama on April 28th, 1926. She was the youngest of four children. Her father was a well-respected lawyer, part-owner of the local newspaper, and actively involved in Alabama state legislature. Her mother suffered from mental illness, what we now believe was likely bipolar disorder. Lee’s interest in writing was first piqued in high school, when she began to develop a love and appreciation for English literature. Upon graduating high school, she attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery, an all female school. Harper Lee was always a tomboy and thus felt out of place amongst the girls at Huntingdon who were focused on dating and clothes while she strived to do her best in her classes. This led her to transfer to

She worked odd jobs for a few years until one day she was reunited with her childhood friend Truman Capote, who was becoming increasingly will known for his own writing. Capote was able to find Lee an agent, and her new friend Michael Martin Brown, a famous Broadway composer, supported her financially for a full year while she worked full time on her current novel; what would become the famous To Kill a Mockingbird. When asked about To Kill a Mockingbird at a 1960s interview Lee said “Naturally, you don't sit down in white hot inspiration and write with a burning flame in front of you. But since I knew I could never be happy being anything but a writer, and Mockingbird put itself together for me so accommodatingly, I kept at it because I knew it had to be my first novel, for better or for worse.” A true American classic, To Kill a Mockingbird won a Pulitzer Prize and was also turned into an Academy Award winning movie in 1963. Lee kept writing throughout her life and her next published work was Go Set a Watchman, in