Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee ( born April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama ) is an American author and Pulitzer Prize winner. My most successful book To Kill a Mockingbird ( Original title: To Kill a Mockingbird ) sold more than 30 million times.

Life and work

Harper Lee is the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee, a lawyer and State Senator from Alabama Democratic Party and Frances Cunningham Lee, nee Finch. A lineage of her father from the Southern General Robert Edward Lee is from the literature as unlikely viewed .. Your first name Nelle is the first name spelled backwards her grandmother Ellen.

Lee received his high school diploma at the Monroe County High School in her hometown. Even as a child she was inclined to writing - her father had been next to the lawyer and political activity also publisher of a local newspaper and even in the early childhood she had the same age Truman Capote met with them in the years 1930-1932 the summer holidays in Monroeville had spent. Nevertheless, Lee decided to study the law. The example of the father and much older sister Alice, who also practiced in his father's law firm since 1943, they had moved to .. She attended the Huntingdon College from 1944 initially in Montgomery, where her sister had studied, but switched in 1945 to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. There she was - as previously in Montgomery also - initially as an isolated loner, but had their first opportunity to publish short texts and later even the editor of the student newspaper Rammer Jammer. In 1948 she received a scholarship for a study trip to the summer course " European civilization in the 20th Century" in Oxford. The six weeks in the English university town she felt in retrospect as " exhilarating Oxford Summer" and " the first open avowal of literature " After this experience, she turned more and more from the law, where they were more interested in the human drama as the technical questions of law, and from the literature. End of 1948, she decided to abandon permanently the study and put this decision in the summer of 1949 into action. A further reason for the final turning to writing to, the business success of Truman Capote's debut, " Other voices, other rooms " have been.

After termination of their studies Lee moved to New York City and worked in a bookstore and some time later at the counter of the airlines Eastern Air Lines and BOAC in New York. About Capote she met Michael and Joy Brown, with whom she became friends quickly. The couple Brown decided to - to promote Lee's literary ambitions - to finance their livelihood for the year 1957. In May 1957, she gave a manuscript of short stories about life in the southern United States in the 1930s, which were connected through the person of the eponymous main character Atticus, one at the publisher JB Lippincott. The manuscript was, however, by Lippincott, the Nelle Harper Lee also the pseudonym suggested, and the editor Tay HolthofF considered not worthy of publication. Much of the main characters, the lawyer Atticus Finch, who is modeled clearly Lee's father, the narrator Scout, wearing alter ego of the author, whose brother Jem and holidaymaker Dill, the trains Truman Capote, but also come in this first draft already before. Over the next three years, she revised under the influence Holt Hoffs draft and linked the previously loosely interrelated stories with each other. She took it to Holt Hoffs Council to take a strong main theme, which can hold together the individual stories. Model for this main theme was a court case from 1933 about the rape a white woman by a black man.

Under the new title of To Kill a Mockingbird ( To Kill a Mockingbird ) appeared Lee's only novel to date in 1960 and received the following year the Pulitzer Prize. In 1962 he was made ​​into a film starring Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus Finch, for which Peck won an Oscar ( the film received a total of three). Truman Capote has occasionally hinted that parts of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird would come from his pen. Pearl Kazin Bell, a publishing editor at Harper's, this assertion holds for plausible because Harper Lee has subsequently published no more novels - what it is according to their own statement, however, that any successor plant would stand in the shadow of the first success. Lavizzari holds the evidence of a co Capote Lee's novel but for rather weak, but feels the refutation of this Capote like scattered rumor is just as impossible as his confirmation.

From the late 1950s to the 1960s, Harper Lee assisted her childhood friend and neighbor Holiday Truman Capote during the research for his novel In Cold Blood (Original Title: In Cold Blood), which is dedicated to her. To be Following the publication of the novel seems to be a divide between Lee and Capote occurred, probably because Harper Lee did not sufficiently appreciated their participation in the novel.

In 1961 Harper Lee two articles in journals: Love - In Other Words in Vogue and Christmas To Me in McCall's. Another essay, When Children Discover America, was published in 1965 in McCall's. It was taken up by President Johnson in the National Council of Arts (June 1966). In 1983 she attended the Alabama History and Heritage Festival in Eufaula, Alabama. There she presented the essay Romance and High Adventure.

Harper Lee lives a very secluded life in New York and Monroeville. One of her rare public appearances was at the receipt of Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award ( Literary Prize of the public libraries of Los Angeles ) in May 2005.

Representation in art

  • Tracey Hoyt played Lee in 1998 in the TV movie Scandalous Me: The Jacqueline Susann Story.
  • Harper Lee was presented in 2005 by Catherine Keener in the film Capote.
  • Sandra Bullock played in 2006 in Cold Blood - In the footsteps of Truman Capote ( Infamous ).

Honors

In 2007 she was the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded the highest civilian honor of the United States.

Works

  • To Kill a Mockingbird, German title To Kill a Mockingbird ( Lippincott, 1960)
  • Love In Other Words (Vogue, April 15, 1961, pp. 64-65 )
  • Christmas To Me ( Mc Call 's, December 1961 )
  • When Children Discover America ( Mc Call 's, August 1965)
  • Romance and High Adventure ( in Clearings in the Thicket, Mercer University Press, 1985)
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