Harper Lee Biography and List of Works

American writer, famous for her race relation's novel TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The book became an international bestseller and was adapted into the screen in 1962. Lee was 34 when the work was published, and it has remained her only novel.

"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

A descendent of Robert E. Lee, the Southern Civil War general, Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama. Her father was a former newspaper editor and proprietor, who had served as a state senator and practised as a lawyer in Monroeville.

Lee studied law at the University of Alabama from 1945 to 1949, and spent a year as an exchange student in Oxford University, Wellington Square. Six months before finishing her studies, she went to New York to pursue a literary career. She worked as an Airline reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways during the 1950s. In 1959 Lee accompanied Truman Capote to Holcombe, Kansas, as a research assistant for Capote's classic 'non-fiction' novel In Cold Blood (1966).

To Kill a Mockingbird was Lee's first novel. The book is set in Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s. Atticus Finch, a lawyer and a father, defends a black man, Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell. The setting and several of the characters are drawn from life - Finch was the maiden name of Lee's mother and the character of Dill was drawn from Capote, Lee's childhood friend.

"But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal - there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockerfeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, of this honourable court, which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levellers, and in our courts all men are created equal."
(Finch defending Tom Robinson)

The narrator is Finch's daughter, nicknamed Scout, an immensely intelligent and observant child. The story begins when she is six years old and relates many of her experiences, including the usual interests of a child, and her collisions with the reality that intrudes into the sheltered world of childhood. Her mother is dead and she tries to keep pace with her older brother Jem. He breaks his arm so badly that it heals shorter than the other. During these humorous and sad events Scout and Jem learn a lesson in good and evil and justice. As Scout's narrative goes on, the reader realizes that one is observing a personality in the making. Scout tells her story in her own language, which is obviously that of a child, but she also analyses the events from the viewpoint of an already grown-up, mature person. We know that she will not grow to become a stiff society lady and she will never kill a mockingbird or wrong a weak person.

A jury of twelve white men refuse to look past the colour of a man's skin and convict Robinson of a crime he did not commit. Bob Ewell, Mayella's father, is obviously guilty of beating her for making sexual advances toward Tom. Atticus and Calpurnia, the black cook, slowly became the moral centre of the book. They are portrayed as pillars of society who do not share its prejudices. The story emphasizes that children are born with an instinct for justice and absorb prejudices in the socialization process. Tom is murdered - the scapegoat of society's prejudice and violence. - "Mr. Finch, there's just some kind of men you have to shoot before you can say howdy to 'em. Even then, they ain't worth the bullet it takes to shoot 'em. Ewell 'as one of 'em."

Although her first novel gained a huge success, Lee did not continue her career as a writer. She returned from New York to Monroeville, where she has lived avoiding interviews.

For further reading: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Joyce Milton, Tessa Krailing (paperback 1984); ToKill a Mockingbird Notes, ed. by Eva Fitzwater( 1984); Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird by Claudia Durst Johnson and Harper Lee (1994 ); Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, ed. by Harold Bloom (1995); To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries by Claudia Durst Johnson (1995) - See also other famous writers who have published only one novel during their lifetime: Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1952), Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind, 1936)