Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, in 1926, the youngest of four children of a lawyer who served in the state legislature. Her childhood friendship with the boy next door — Truman Streckfus Persons, later Truman Capote — is well documented; they appeared in each other's early lives and early work, and in 1959 she accompanied him to Kansas to assist with the research that became In Cold Blood, a collaboration that has received more scholarly attention as both writers' papers have become available.

After studying law at the University of Alabama without finishing her degree, Lee moved to New York in the early 1950s and worked as a reservations clerk for Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways while writing in whatever time she could find. In 1956, friends — the Broadway composer and lyricist Michael Martin Brown and his wife Joy — gave her a year's salary as a Christmas present and told her to quit her job and write. She used the year to finish To Kill a Mockingbird.

The novel, published in July 1960, is narrated by Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, looking back on three years of her childhood in the fictional Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression. The story turns on the trial of Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, and on her father Atticus Finch's defense of him. It is also a novel about childhood, loss of innocence, the mystery of Boo Radley, and the social texture of a small Southern town. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It has never been out of print. It has sold more than forty million copies and is assigned in schools across the English-speaking world, sometimes controversially given its language and subject matter, sometimes as the occasion for that controversy.

Lee became famous and then became a recluse. She gave almost no interviews after the early 1960s, lived in New York during winters and returned to Monroeville for summers, and declined virtually all attention. Her sister Alice — also a lawyer, eleven years older — served as her protector and public-facing representative for decades. After Alice's death in 2014, Lee's affairs passed to other hands.

Go Set a Watchman was published in July 2015. It is the novel Lee wrote before Mockingbird — a draft that her editor at Lippincott, Tay Hohoff, identified as containing flashbacks strong enough to be developed into a separate novel. That development became To Kill a Mockingbird; the original manuscript was set aside and, apparently, forgotten. In Watchman, an adult Scout returns to Maycomb to find her father, Atticus, holds white supremacist views he had concealed behind legal proceduralism in her childhood. The publication was immediately controversial, partly because of what it revealed about Atticus, partly because of questions about the circumstances under which an elderly woman with documented cognitive and sensory decline authorized publication of a manuscript she had not looked at in decades. Lee's longtime attorney negotiated the deal; Alice Lee's death had removed the person most likely to have prevented it. Lee died in February 2016, eight months after the book appeared.

The question Watchman raises about Mockingbird is genuinely uncomfortable: whether Atticus's defense of Tom Robinson was ever rooted in racial justice or was the proceduralism of a man who believes in the law as a system and in the racial order as a given. This reading was available in Mockingbird before Watchman appeared — critics including James Baldwin and Toni Morrison noted its limitations — but the publication of Watchman made it impossible to ignore. The novel as taught and as beloved may have always been a partial reading of a more complicated book.