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Nelle Harper Lee was born in April 1926 in Monroeville Alabama, the same small town where Truman Capote spent several years of his childhood.  (Capote and Harper became best of friends as children and remained close  until he died in 1984.)

Harper is the youngest of four children. She attended Huntingdon College 1944-45, studied law at University of Alabama 1945-49, and studied at Oxford University for one year. In the 1950s she worked in New York City as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC.  She gave up this position in order to focus on her writing for one full year.  Around that time, her father became ill and she returned to Alabama to care for him.   She began dividing her time between New York and Monroeville (she still does).

In 1957 Lee submitted her manuscript for To Kill a Mockingbird to the J. B. Lippincott Company. It is well documented that she was told that her novel consisted of a series of short stories strung together, and she should re-write it. She took the criticism seriously spending the next two and half years re-writing. She hired an editor Tay Hohoff, and in 1960, when she was 34, To Kill a Mockingbird was published. The novel won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and became an international bestseller and was adapted to film in 1962.  An even greater testament to the novel’s quality is the fact that it has never gone out of print—an extremely rare honor for novel.

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Since then, she has published only four articles including Love–In Other Words in Vogue, and Christmas To Me in McCalls.   When Children Discover America was published in 1965.  She traveled to Kansas with Truman Capote to help with research for his bestseller, In Cold Blood.

In 1966, President Johnson named Lee to the National Council of Arts. She has received numerous honorary doctorates, but rarely grants interviews, or gives speeches.  When asked to write an introduction to her novel on its 35th anniversary, she refused asking that her novel be spared the introduction, reminding us that the book has never been out of print and that she is alive.   Indeed, she is alive and well, sharing her time between her home in New York City and Monroeville, Alabama.