Harper Lee

Harper Lee

a.     About the author

Ans: Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Her mother's name was Finch. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1926 to 1938. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and was best friends with her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote. In 1944, Lee graduated from Monroe County High School in Monroeville, and enrolled at the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery for one year, and pursued a law degree at the University of Alabama from 1945 to 1949, pledging the Chi Omega sorority. Lee wrote for several student publications and spent a year as editor of the campus humor magazine, Rammer Jammer. Though she did not complete the law degree, she studied for a summer in Oxford, England, before moving to New York City in 1950, where she worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC. Lee continued as a reservation clerk until 1958, when she devoted herself to writing. She lived a frugal life, traveling between her cold-water-only apartment in New York City and her family home in south-central Alabama to care for her father.

b.     Biodata.

Ans: Harper Lee was only five years old in when, in April 1931 in the small Alabama town of Scottsboro, the first trials began with regard to the purported rapes of two white women by nine young black men. The defendants, who were nearly lynched before being brought to court, were not provided with the services of a lawyer until the first day of trial. Despite medical testimony that the women had not been raped, the all-white jury found the men guilty of the crime and sentenced all but the youngest, a twelve-year-old boy, to death. Six years of subsequent trials saw most of these convictions repealed and all but one of the men freed or paroled. The Scottsboro case left a deep impression on the young Lee, who would use it later as the rough basis for the events in To Kill a Mockingbird.

c.      Novels written by her.

Ans: Harper Lee wrote several novels which include To Kill a Mockingbird, Snow! Snow! Snow!, Matar un ruisenor, Ne Tirez Pas Sur L'oiseau Moqueur and Sparknotes to Kill a Mockingbird.

d.     Awards received.

Ans: Harper Lee received the Pulitzer Prize (1961),  Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (1961), Alabama Library Association Award (1961), Bestsellers Paperback of the Year Award (1962) 
Member, National Council on the Arts (1966), Best Novel of the Century, Library Journal (1999), Alabama Humanities Award (2002), ATTY Award, Spector Gadon & Rosen Foundation (2005), Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award (2005), Honorary degree, University of Notre Dame (2006) 
American Academy of Arts and Letters (2007) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2007).

e.      Why was To kill a mockingbird a significant novel to Harper Lee?

Ans: She was best known for her 1960 Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which deals with the issues of racism that were observed by the author as a child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Despite being Lee's only published book, it led to Lee being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom of the United States for her contribution to literature in 2007.