About authors

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, to Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Harper Lee grew up in the small southwestern Alabama town of Monroeville. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who also served on the state legislature (1926-38). As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and she enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote, who provided the basis of the character of Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
Wrote:

• To Kill a Mockingbird. (1960) New York: J. B. Lippincott.
• "Love — In Other Words". (April 15, 1961) Vogue, pp. 64–65
• "Christmas to Me". (December 1961) McCall's
• "When Children Discover America". (August 1965) McCall's
• "Romance and High Adventure" (1983), a paper presented in Eufaula, Alabama and collected in 1985 in the anthology Clearings in the Thicket.
• Open letter to Oprah Winfrey (July 2006), O: The Oprah Magazine