SOURCE CITATION
"Harper Lee." Authors and Artists for Young Adults. Vol. 13. Gale Research, 1994. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
As a child, Harper Lee was "a rough 'n' tough tomboy.... She had short, cropped hair, wore coveralls, went barefoot, and could talk mean like a boy," according to Marianne M. Moates in A Bridge of Childhood: Truman Capote's Southern Years. Known as Nelle to her family and friends in the small town of Monroeville, Alabama, Lee lived next door to the Faulks--spinster sisters Jenny, Sook, and Callie, and brother Bud; writer Truman Capote lived with the Faulks for several childhood summers, as well (and may have been the model for Dill, Scout and Jem's "summer" friend). In many ways, Moates's description of young Lee mirrors that of Scout in the author's only completed novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. The striking similarities between Lee and her fictional counterpart are also reflected in the parallels between the fictional setting of the novel and Lee's hometown. At times, Lee's use of autobiographical elements gave rise to controversy. Amid all the hoopla for Lee's winning the Pulitzer Prize was gossip that her friend Truman Capote had actually written the book for her. According to Moates, there was also a rumor that one Monroeville family threatened to sue the author because the book's heroic, reclusive Boo Radley too closely resembled someone in their family. Moates, who attended some of the social events honoring Lee's early celebrity, observes: "When [Lee] had enough, she reminded people that her book was fiction, zipped her lips shut, and caught the next plane back to New York."

Lee's lips have stayed shut, for the most part, since the mid-1960s. A fairly reclusive author, Lee was initially surprised by reader reaction to her book. Since To Kill a Mockingbird's publication, she has given few interviews and, for all intents and purposes, seems to have "faded from view." Lee's sister Alice--an attorney practicing in Monroeville--filled in some gaps when she told Authors and Artists for Young Adults that her sister currently divides her time between New York City and Monroeville. Neither Lee sister, however, cares to discuss the novel written more than thirty years ago because they consider it "old news."

To Kill a Mockingbird: Lee's Claim to Fame
Whatever the reasons behind for Lee's failure to publish another book, To Kill a Mockingbird remains very popular with young adult readers; it is also a frequent selection in high school and college English classes. In the three-plus decades since its release, To Kill a Mockingbird remains one of the most studied novels in modern American literature, in large part because its themes and characters have a timeless appeal. According to Dorothy Jewell Altman in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Lee's place in American letters is assured because this "regional novel with a universal message ... combines popular appeal with literary excellence."

According to Altman, Lee spent several years writing her novel. She did not, however, begin her writing career with To Kill a Mockingbird in mind. In the early 1950s, Lee worked as an airline reservations clerk in New York City, writing essays and short stories in her off hours. Encouraged by her literary agent to expand one of her stories into a novel, Lee quit her airline job. With the financial support of some friends, she spent several years revising her manuscript before submitting it to Lippincott in 1957. When editors criticized Lee's initial plot structure as being too disjointed and fragmentary, the author made some revisions, making her final--and accepted--submission in early 1960.

To Kill a Mockingbird is "quite an ambiguous title," states R. A. Dave in Indian Studies in American Fiction, leaving one "guessing whether it is a crime-thriller or a book on bird-hunting." In truth, the book is about a young girl's coming of age in an era of social and political upheaval. Jean Louise Finch (also known as Scout)--the novel's narrator--lives with her bother Jem and widowed father Atticus in the small fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama during the 1930s. Told from the perspective of a grown-up Scout, the novel traces the circumstances that lead Atticus to take on the case of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. In the three years surrounding the trial, Scout and Jem witness the unjust consequences of prejudice and hate, while at the same time experiencing the value of courage and integrity through the example of their father. Through the course of the book, readers come to know the residents of Maycomb--good and bad--as well as the misunderstandings and long-held beliefs that lead to the book's tragic climax.

The novel's colorful characters have long been a draw for young readers. Aside from independent Scout, there is stalwart Jem and mischievous Dill Harris, whose antics and wild plans often get the trio into "worlds of trouble." Calpurnia, the Finch's black housekeeper, helps keep the children in line; she also exposes them to Tom Robinson's world via a trip to her church for Sunday services. Arthur "Boo" Radley--perhaps the most tragic figure in the tale--is the town recluse. As the novel progresses, Scout, Jem, and Dill come to see Boo as less of a scary, shadowy figure, and more of a feeling human being. Through all the book's turmoil, Atticus Finch remains the voice of reason and restraint. While obviously disturbed and dismayed by the nature of Tom Robinson's trial, the lawyer nevertheless takes great pains to explain to his children why his participation, as well as their understanding, is necessary.

Initial critical response to Lee's story was mixed. Harding LeMay, writing in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, praises the author's "grace of writing and honorable decency of intent." "Miss Lee's problem has been to tell the story she wants to tell and yet stay within the consciousness of a child, and she hasn't consistently solved it," observes Granville Hicks in Saturday Review. Dave, in a more supportive vein, claims that in the novel "there is a complete cohesion of art and morality. And therein lies [To Kill a Mockingbird's] success. [Lee] is a remarkable storyteller. The reader just glides through the novel abounding in humor and pathos, hopes and fears, love and hatred, humanity and brutality--all affording him a memorable human experience of journeying through sunshine and rain at once.... The tale of heroic struggle lingers in our memory as an unforgettable experience."

Setting and Characterization: The Old Vs. the New South
Aside from Lee's depiction of various Southern character "types," the unique setting of her novel has engendered a great deal of commentary. Fred Erisman of the Alabama Review argues that Lee's novel reflects the possibilities of a new, revitalized South, moving "from the archaic, imported romanticism of its past toward the more reasonable, pragmatic, and native romanticism of a Ralph Waldo Emerson." Erisman remarks that Lee establishes the stagnant "Old South" setting by describing Maycomb of the early 1930s as "an old town," "a tired old town," and "an ancient town." He points to Lee's description of the Maycomb County courthouse, which dominates the town square, as symbolizing the South's being mired in the past: "Greek revival columns clashed with a big nineteenth-century clock toward housing a rusty unreliable instrument, a view indicating a people determined to preserve every physical scrap of the past."

Erisman offers two specific examples to show Maycomb's affinity with the past, the first being Jem's reading of Sir Walter Scott's romantic classic Ivanhoe to the dying Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose (described in the text as an "indomitable Southern lady"). Again connecting setting to characterization, Erisman contrasts Atticus and his class-conscious sister Alexandra. While Alexandra "reveres and protects" class distinctions between the upper class (the Finches) and the lower class (the Cunninghams), Atticus presents a more benevolent Southern face. He is the one man the town knows is incorruptible and honorable, a man who will not be swayed by public opinion. This becomes clearer in passages such as the one in which the attorney explains to Scout his opinion about the townspeople's prejudice against Tom Robinson: "They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions ... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

Many critics have tried analyze the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird by looking at Lee's childhood. Altman notes that Lee claims the novel is not autobiographical; the author also admits, however, that a writer "should write about what [he or she] knows and write truthfully." Moates is one of several writers who find obvious similarities between fiction and reality in the text. According to Moates, Lee grew up the youngest of three children in a strictly segregated town. In her novel, she uses her mother's maiden name for her fictional family, and makes Atticus a lawyer like her father Amasa. Lee's mother Frances Finch was eccentric, often rising in the middle of the night and "banging out tunes that in the summer months could be heard all the way to the downtown square," writes Moates. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout reveals that her mother died from a sudden heart attack when she was two, so she never felt her mother's absence and does not miss her.

Moates goes on to describe Lee's father, Amasa Coleman Lee, as an attorney preoccupied by work who nevertheless tried to spend time with his family (much the same as the fictional Atticus). Scout has this to say about her father Atticus: "Jem and I found our father satisfactory: he played with us, read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment."

Monroeville and Maycomb: Merging Fact and Fiction
Stories about Lee's childhood--as it meshed with writer Truman Capote--have long been part of the mystique surrounding the author's novel. Lee's real-life youthful adventures with young Capote are in many ways similar to those enjoyed by Scout and Jem with Dill. According to Moates, Lee was Capote's "pal, confidante, and, at times, sparring partner." The duo--together with one of Lee's brothers--played together constantly. They conspired in Nelle's backyard tree house, swam in the creek, and staged a Halloween party. When Moates moved to Monroeville in 1961, she walked by the town's grammar school, knowing that "one of the big oak trees on the school grounds was the tree where Boo Radley had hidden trinkets for Scout and Jem" and that nearby in the center of town "stood the tired red-brick courthouse, supposedly where Atticus Finch defended a wronged black man." She also describes the Lees's and Faulks' homes, separated by a hedge through which the children slipped back and forth to visit.

Along with these tales about Lee's family and neighbors, Moates suggests some other possible origins for the novel's characters. For example, Lee's next-door neighbor Callie Faulk, a former schoolteacher, read to a blind neighbor while the neighborhood children listened from the sofa. When Lee writes about Scout's frustrations in school--most notably being so far ahead of her peers in reading that she was bored--Moates speculates that Lee might have been thinking of Capote's having "to sit through slow, dreary lessons when he had been reading since age five," thus transferring Capote's predicament to Scout's: "If I didn't have to stay [in school] I'd leave. Jem, that damn lady says Atticus's been teaching me to read and for him to stop it." Furthermore, Callie's oldest sister, Sook, is described by Moates as a "childlike woman who probably suffered from agoraphobia, an abnormal fear of being in public places" and who became a recluse hiding in the house's shadows. "If a stranger came," Moates writes, "she ducked out of sight." Sook and the children, however, shared a very close emotional bond: they cleaned the house, baked tea cakes and other special delights, read comic books, worked jigsaw puzzles, and rocked on the back porch.

Another reclusive person lived in Lee's neighborhood--the son of the Boular family who lived down the street. Moates speculates that this man may have inspired the characterization Boo Radley, since young Boular stayed hidden away in the house, eventually becoming the neighborhood "bogeyman" in impressionable children's imaginations. In Lee's novel, Jem describes the creature he has never seen: "Boo was about six- and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were bloodstained--if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time." While Monroeville's Boular (and Boo Radley, for that matter), did not fit this description, it is rather easy to see how such a person might ignite a writer's--and a child's--imagination.

Narrative Point of View: Child's Eyes, Adult's Heart
Readers see all the people and events of To Kill a Mockingbird through Scout's eyes--the "structural forte" of the novel, asserts William T. Going in Essays on Alabama Literature. Going claims that many early reviewers of the novel either misunderstood or misinterpreted the way Lee tells her story. For instance, Atlantic Monthly reviewer Phoebe Adams refers to the narrative point of view as "frankly and completely impossible, being told in the first person by a six-year-old girl with the prose and style of a well-educated adult." Richard Sullivan of the Chicago Tribune is similarly puzzled by Lee's narrator: "The unaffected young narrator uses adult language to render the matter she deals with, but the point of view is cunningly restricted to that of a perceptive, independent child, who doesn't always understand fully what's happening, but who conveys completely, by implication, the weight and burden of the story." Going, however, concludes that the narrator's "evolving perception of the social milieu is handled through a "well-conceived" point of view which combines "child eyes and mature heart."

Theme: Chasing Away "Gray Ghosts"
Connected to the issue of the South's racial conflict are several other themes that capture many critics' attention. For example, Edgar H. Schuster, writing in English Journal, points to Scout and Jem's psychological growth, the Maycomb "caste system," and education versus superstition as themes which help explain the novel's theme and structure. Jem and Scout learn a great deal from the people and events around them during the three years of the story; in particular, they learn to replace fear and ignorance with security and knowledge, asserts Schuster. When Dill dares Jem to touch Boo Radley's spooky house, he wagers his book The Gray Ghost against two Tom Swift books. Schuster points out that two of the children's neighbors--Mrs. Dubose ("gray" in age and the unknown) and Radley (in a "gray" house)--are "'ghosts' in the sense that the children do not know them; fear and prejudice and superstition surround both homes."

As the story progresses from the first chapter to the last, Lee demonstrates how the children's contacts with the real Dubose and Radley have dispelled their gray ghosts--superstitions, prejudices, and fears. Schuster remarks, "The achievement of Harper Lee is not that she has written another novel about race prejudice, but rather that she has placed race prejudice in a perspective which allows us to see it as an aspect of a larger thing; as something that arises from phantom contacts from fear and lack of knowledge; and finally as something that disappears with the kind of knowledge or 'education' that one gains through learning what people are really like when you 'finally see them.'" Schuster concludes that the theme and structure unify to show the children's becoming educated to the ways of the world. He praises the novel's astute "rendering of a child's perspective through an adult's evaluation as among the most technically expert in contemporary literature."

When no second novel appeared thirty years after Lee's initial phenomenal success, many readers and critics began to question the reasons why. Associated Press writer Nancy Shulins speculates in Item that Lee had joined writers such as J. D. Salinger "who relinquish the spotlight at the height of fame" but "leave an indelible mark on the audiences they abandon." Shulins quotes a 1961 Newsweek article that promises a forthcoming novel: "Snowed under by fan letters, Harper Lee is stealing time from a new novel-in-progress to write careful answers." Except for some short pieces in popular women's magazines, however, Lee never published again. Like the reclusive Boo Radley, she has consistently declined to come out and speak. Critics can only speculate as to whether this reticence was caused by Lee's disillusionment with celebrity status, or perhaps, that the ideas for writing ceased to come. Even without a second novel however, the author's reputation seems secure. As Lee herself once said: "Writing is the hardest thing in the world ... but writing is the only thing that has made me completely happy."

UPDATES
May 23, 2005: Lee made a rare public appearance to accept the Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, May 23, 2005.

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Addresses: Home: Monroeville, AL.; Contact: c/o McIntosh & Otis, Inc., 18 East 41st Street, New York, NY 10017.

AWARDS
Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 1961, for To Kill a Mockingbird; Brotherhood Award, National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1961; Alabama Library Association Award, 1961; Paperback of the Year award, Best Sellers, 1962, for To Kill a Mockingbird.

CAREER
Novelist and essayist. Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways, New York City, airline reservations clerk, early 1950s.