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Harper Lee
Harper Lee Biography
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Harper Lee with Mary Badham who played Scout in the film adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird
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Nelle Harper Lee (born 28 April 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama) is an American writer and Pulitzer Prize winner. She is best known for her book To Kill A Mockingbird.
Harper Lee was the youngest of four children of Frances Cunningham Finch Lee and Amasa Coleman Lee, a lawyer and state senator from Alabama and a descendant of the Southern General Robert E. Lee. She attended Huntingdon College (1944-1945), studied law at the University of Alabama (1945-1949) and spent a year at Oxford in England. Before her career as a writer, she worked during the 50's for some time at the counter of Eastern Airlines and BOAC in New York. She eventually left this job in order to completely devote herself to writing.
In 1957 Harper Lee submitted a manuscript of short stories about life in the southern U.S. to the publishing house JB Lippincott & Co. There, working with her editor Tay Hohoff, she turned these into the novel To Kill A Mockingbird over the next two and a half years.
Her first and only book, To Kill a Mockingbird was released in 1960 and the following year it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. By 1962 To Kill a Mockingbird was already being made into a movie with Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus Finch, for which he won an Oscar. The film received three Oscars in total.
After To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee assisted her childhood friend and neighbor Truman Capote in research for his novel In Cold Blood. The character of Scout's neighbour Dill in To Kill A Mockingbird was probably based on Truman Capote. Truman Capote has occasionally hinted that parts of To Kill a Mockingbird came from his pen. Pearl Kazin Bell, a publishing editor of Harper's, sees these allegations as coming from the fact that Harper Lee has published no more novels since To Kill A Mockingbird. However Harper Lee has stated that this is because any successor would only stand in the shadow of To Kill A Mockingbird.
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In 1961 Harper Lee published two articles in magazines: "Love - In Other Words" in Vogue and "Christmas To Me" in McCall's. Another essay, "When Children Discover America" was also published in McCall's in 1965.
In June 1966 Harper Lee was named by President Johnson in the National Council on the Arts.
In 1983 she attended the Alabama History and Heritage Festival in Eufaula, Alabama. There Lee presented the essay "Romance and High Adventure".
Harper Lee lives in New York and Monroeville, very withdrawn from the public. One of her rare public appearances was to receive the Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award in May 2005.
In 2007, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.
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