Harper Lee
In 1961, To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an award that marked the highest formal recognition of Harper Lee's work as a novelist.
Born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, Lee attended Monroe County High School before continuing her education at Huntingdon College and then the University of Alabama, where she studied at the School of Law. She was a citizen of the United States who wrote in English, and her career took shape as a novelist rather than as a lawyer. During the research for In Cold Blood, she assisted Truman Capote, contributing to the investigative work behind that project. Her own novels included To Kill a Mockingbird and, decades later, Go Set a Watchman.
The honors Lee received over the course of her life were considerable. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Arts, and she was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame. These recognitions, spread across different years and institutions, reflect the range of acknowledgment her writing and public life attracted.
Lee died on February 19, 2016, in Monroeville, the same Alabama town where she had been born nearly ninety years before. The Pulitzer Prize she received for To Kill a Mockingbird in 1961 stands as one of the most concrete measures of recognition her work earned during her lifetime, and her name is preserved in institutional records including the Library of Congress Name Authority File under the authorized label "Lee, Harper."
Quotes by Harper Lee
Harper Lee's insights on:
I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly, and that is small-town, middle-class southern life.
My daddy had a pocket watch that he wore at all times in court. I gave Greg the watch and showed him how Daddy used to use it.
The tradition of the South is not urban... I think we are a region of storytellers, naturally, just from our tribal instincts. We did not have the pleasures of the theater or the dance, motion pictures when they came along. We simply entertain each other by talking.
In that film, the man and the part met. As far as I'm concerned, that part is Greg's for life. I've had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I've always refused.
This was life in the '30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.
It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn't have an eventful childhood.
It was something I never expected to - I never expected the book would sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers.
So many writers don't like to write... I like to write, and sometimes I'm afraid I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don't want to leave it. And as a result, I'll go for days and days and days without leaving my house.
I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.