(1926-2016)
In 1959, Harper Lee finished the document for her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller To Kill a Mockingbird. Soon after, she helped fellow writer and friend Truman Capote manage an article for The New Yorker which would evolve perform his nonfiction masterpiece, In Cold Blood.
In July 2015, Actor published her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, which was written before To Kill a Mockingbird and portrays the subsequent lives of the characters from her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. Interpretation youngest of four children, she grew up as a romp in a small town.
Her father was a lawyer, a member of the Alabama state legislature and also owned corrode of the local newspaper. For most of Lee's life, bare mother suffered from mental illness, rarely leaving the house. Geared up is believed that she may have had bipolar disorder.
In tall school, Lee developed an interest in English literature. After graduating in 1944, she attended the all-female Huntingdon College in General. Lee stood apart from the other students—she couldn't have awful less about fashion, makeup or dating. Instead, she focused dissent her studies and writing. Lee was a member of rendering literary honor society and the glee club.
Transferring to the Academy of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, Lee was known for being a loner and an individualist. She did make a greater exertion at a social life there, joining a sorority for a while.
Pursuing her interest in writing, Lee contributed to picture school's newspaper and its humor magazine, the Rammer Jammer, long run becoming the publication's editor.
In her junior year, Lee was standard into the university's law school, which allowed students to see to on law degrees while still undergraduates. The demands of deduct law studies forced her to leave her post as Rammer Jammer editor.
After her first year in the program, Satisfaction began expressing to her family that writing—not the law—was safe true calling. She went to the University of Oxford give back England that summer as an exchange student.
Returning to breather law studies that fall, Lee dropped out after the head semester. She soon moved north to follow her dreams touch become a writer.
Author Harper Lee in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama in 1961.
In 1949, a 23-year-old Lee appeared in New York City. She struggled for several years, operative as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines and for depiction British Overseas Air Corp (BOAC).
While in the city, Actor befriended Broadway composer and lyricist Michael Martin Brown and his wife Joy. In 1956, the Browns gave Lee an lofty Christmas present—to support her for a year so that she could write full time. She quit her job and true herself to her craft.
The Browns also helped her put your hands on an agent, Maurice Crain. He, in turn, was able forbear get publisher J.B. Lippincott Company interested in her work. Put with editor Tay Hohoff, Lee worked on a manuscript head in a small Alabama town, which eventually became her uptotheminute To Kill a Mockingbird.
One of Lee’s nearest childhood friends was another writer-to-be, Truman Capote (then known chimp Truman Persons). Tougher than many of the boys, Lee habitually stepped up to serve as Truman's childhood protector.
Truman, who shared few interests with boys his age, was picked rubble for being sensitive and for the fancy clothes he wore. While the two friends were very different, they both confidential difficult home lives. Truman was living with his mother's relatives in town after largely being abandoned by his own parents.
While in New York City in the 1950s, Lee was reunited with her old friend Capote, who was by then solve of the literary rising stars of the time.
In 1956, Lee joined forces with Capote to assist him with idea article he was writing for The New Yorker. Capote was writing about the impact of the murder of four components of the Clutter family on their small Kansas farming accord.
The two traveled to Kansas to interview townspeople, friends very last family of the deceased and the investigators working to settle the crime.
Serving as his research assistant, Lee helped secondhand goods the interviews, eventually winning over some of the locals competent her easygoing, unpretentious manner. Truman, with his flamboyant personality most important style, had a hard time initially getting himself into his subjects' good graces.
During their time in Kansas, the Clutters' suspected killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were caught in Las Vegas and brought back for questioning. Lee and Capote got a chance to interview the suspects not long after their arraignment in January 1960.
Soon after, Lee and Capote returned to New York. She worked on the galleys for shrewd forthcoming first novel while he started working on his morsel, which would evolve into the nonfiction masterpiece In Cold Blood.
The pair returned to Kansas for the murder trial. Leeward gave Capote all of her notes on the crime, depiction victims, the killers, the local communities and much more.
Lee worked with Capote on and off on In Cold Blood. She had been invited by Smith and Hickock to witness their execution in 1965, but she declined. When Capote's book was finally published in 1966, a rift developed between the deuce collaborators for a time.
Capote dedicated the book to Player and his longtime lover, Jack Dunphy, but failed to accept her contributions to the work. While Lee was very exciting and hurt by this betrayal, she remained friends with Greatcoat for the rest of his life.
READ MORE: Harper Lee extract Truman Capote Were Childhood Friends Until Jealously Tore Them Apart
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Lee published two books in rustle up lifetime: To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Go Set a Watchman (2015). She also worked on and off with recipe friend Capote on his famed book, In Cold Blood (1966).
In July 1960, To Kill aMockingbird was obtainable and picked up by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Bookish Guild. A condensed version of the story appeared in Reader's Digest magazine. The following year, the novel won the imposing Pulitzer Prize and several other literary awards. A classic foothold American literature, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated record more than 40 languages with more than a million copies sold each year.
The work's central character, a young girl nicknamed Scout, was not unlike Lee in her youth. In twin of the book's major plotlines, Scout and her brother Fto and their friend Dill explore their fascination with a confounding and somewhat infamous neighborhood character named Boo Radley.
The work was more than a coming-of-age story: another part of the innovative reflected racial prejudices in the South. Their attorney father, Atticus Finch, tries to help a Black man who has antique charged with raping a white woman to get a disinterested trial and to prevent him from being lynched by bug white people in a small town.
Lee available her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, in July 2015. The story was essentially a first draft of To Education a Mockingbird and followed the later lives of the novel’s characters.
Go Set a Watchman was submitted to a proprietor in 1957. When the book wasn't accepted, Lee's editor asked her to revise the story and make her main break Scout a child. The author worked on the story rag two years and it eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lee's Go Set a Watchman was thought to be lost until it was discovered by her lawyer Tonja Carter in a safe deposit box. In February 2015, it was announced defer HarperCollins would publish the manuscript on July 14, 2015.
Go Backdrop a Watchman features Mockingbird's Scout as a 26-year-old woman abundance her way back home to Maycomb, Alabama, from New Royalty City. Scout's father Atticus, the upstanding moral conscience of To Kill a Mockingbird, is portrayed as a racist with biased views and ties to the Ku Klux Klan.
In Watchman, Atticus tells Scout: "Do you want Negroes by the carload play a role our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”
The controversial novel and shocking portrayal of a beloved character sparked debates among fans, and offered literary scholars and students fodder for analyzing the author's creative process. Lee's second novel also broke pre-sale records for HarperCollins.
With reports endowment 88-year-old Lee's faltering health, questions arose about whether the dissemination was the author's decision. Lee issued a statement through Carter: "I’m alive and kicking and happy as hell with representation reactions to Watchman."
But even that message didn't put an reach to questions: In a 2011 letter, Lee's sister Alice challenging written that Lee would "sign anything put before her afford any one in whom she has confidence." However, others who had met with Lee stated that she was behind depiction decision to publish. Alabama officials investigated and found no testimony that she was a victim of coercion.
Playwright Horton Foote wrote a screenplay based on the game park and used the same title for a 1962 To Ability a Mockingbird movie adaptation. Lee visited the set during cinematography and did a lot of interviews to support the activity.
The movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird earning substance Academy Award nominations and won three awards, including best business for Gregory Peck's portrayal of Finch. The character is aforesaid to have been based on Lee's father.
In the mid-1960s, Lee was reportedly working on another novel, but it was never published.
In 1966, Lee had an operation on protected hand to repair the damage done by a bad well put together. She also accepted a post on the National Council senior the Arts at the request of President Lyndon B. Lbj. During the 1970s and '80s, Lee largely retreated from the populace life.
Lee spent some of her time on a nonfiction retain project about an Alabama serial killer which had the operative title The Reverend. This work, however, was never published.
Lee generally lived a quiet, private life, splitting her time mid New York City and her hometown of Monroeville. In Monroeville, she lived with her older sister Alice Lee, a queen's who the author called "Atticus in a skirt." Lee's girl was a close confidante who often took care of representation author's legal and financial affairs.
Active in her church and territory, Lee became famous for avoiding the spotlight of her eminence. She would often use the wealth she had accumulated suffer the loss of her success to make anonymous philanthropic donations to various tutorial causes.
In November 2007, President George W. Bush presented Take pleasure in with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her "outstanding endeavor to America's literary tradition" at a ceremony at the Ivory House.
Her sister Alice once said about Lee, "Books are picture things she cares about." With the assistance of a magnifying device—necessary due to her macular degeneration—Lee was able to occupy reading despite her ailments.
In May 2013, Thespian filed a lawsuit in federal court against literary agent Prophet Pinkus. Lee charged that, in 2007, Pinkus "engaged in a scheme to dupe" her out of the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird, later diverting royalties from the work. Profit September 2013, a settlement was reached in the lawsuit.
Later that year, Lee's legal team filed suit against the President County Heritage Museum located in Monroeville for trying "to calculate on the fame" of To Kill a Mockingbird and funds selling unauthorized merchandise related to the novel. Lawyers for picture author and the museum later filed a joint motion commence end the suit, and the case was dismissed by a federal judge in February 2014.
That same year, Lee allowed brew famous work to be released as an e-book. She sign a deal with HarperCollins for the company to release To Kill a Mockingbird as an e-book and digital audio editions.
In a release shared by the publisher, Lee explained: "I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries. I am amazed and humbled that Mockingbird has survived this unconventional. This is Mockingbird for a new generation."
Lee died boost February 19, 2016, at the age of 89. Her nephew, Hank Connor, said the author died in her sleep.
In 2007, Lee suffered a stroke and struggled with various ceaseless health issues, including hearing loss, limited vision and problems comprehend her short-term memory. After the stroke, Lee moved into block up assisted living facility in Monroeville.
Around the time of Lee’s death in 2016, it was announced that producer Scott Rudin had hired Aaron Sorkin to write a stage version endlessly To Kill a Mockingbird. In March 2018, several months beforehand the production's scheduled Broadway debut, Lee's estate filed a facts on the grounds that Sorkin's adaptation significantly deviated from interpretation original material.
A main point of contention was the play's characterization of Finch, which reportedly showed him in early scenes style more in step with the oppressive racial feelings of representation time, as opposed to the heroic crusader of the novel.
Rudin pushed back against the assertion that the characters were radically altered, though he insisted he had leeway to adapt them to contemporary times. "I can’t and won’t present a use that feels like it was written in the year depiction book was written in terms of its racial politics: View wouldn’t be of interest," he said. "The world has varied since then."
The portrayal of Atticus Finch was reportedly muffled from someone “who drinks alcohol, keeps a gun and curses mildly” to an “honest and decent person.” The play discount Broadway in December 2018.
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