HARPER LEE

EARLY lIFE

• Born: August 28, 1926 ; 89 years old
• Born in Monroeville, Alabama
• She grew up as a tomboy, just like Scout
• Truman Capote, her closest childhood friend, was a fellow writer and the inspiration for Dill
• Youngest of 4 children
• She never married

PARENTS

• Father was Amasa Coleman Lee
• He was a lawyer, a newspaper editor, and a state senator, and the inspiration for Atticus
• Her mother, Francis Cunningham Finch, was mentally unwell and stayed in the house most of the time

EDUCATION

• Attended Huntington College
• University of Alabama, where she had an unfinished law degree
• Oxford University, England but she dropped out
• She was well-educated for a woman of her time
• She wrote for a school magazine called Rammer Jammer
• She was also part of the Glee club and the Literary Honorary Society

PUBLISHING

• She tried to publish the novel in 1957, but failed
• She changed the book into a cohesive novel instead of a collection of short stories
• Finally published in 1960

AWARDS FOR THE BOOK

• Pulitzer Prize 1961
• Spent 88 weeks on the best seller list
• Has sold over 30 million copies
• Selected as the best novel of the 1900's
• Lee won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 for the influence her book has had on American society
• Also, the movie won 3 Oscars
• The book also won the Quill award for being the best audiobook

INSPIRATION

• Her inspiration for To Kill A Mockingbird was her childhood, growing up in the Great Depression-era Alabama
• Although, Maycomb, Alabama is not a real place
• Also, there was a man like Boo Radley who lived down the street from Lee

LATER LIFE

• accepted a post on the National Council of Art in 1966
• Her new book, Go Set A Watchman, is set to be published on July 14th, 2015
• This book features many of the characters from To Kill A Mockingbird, just 20 years later.
• This book was originally written in the mid-1950s