Happy Birthday -- Harper Lee turns 85 (today April 28, 2011)

from Writer's Almanac (Garrison Keillor list serv: Minnesota Public Radio)

Today is the birthday of the woman whose one and only novel begins ordinarily enough: 'When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.' The rest of the book, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), is concerned with the events leading up to Jem's broken arm. Nelle Harper Lee (1926) was born in Monroeville, Alabama, and she was named after her grandmother Ellen -- 'Nelle' is 'Ellen' spelled backward. She was a tomboy, and her father was a lawyer, and so they shared some similarities with her characters, Scout and Atticus Finch. Her mother rarely left the house, because she suffered from mental illness, and young Nelle befriended -- and often defended -- fellow kindergartener and next-door neighbor Truman Persons. They didn't have much in common apart from family problems and a love of reading, but they became best friends.

At first Nelle thought she might follow in her father's footsteps, and so she entered law school. But after the first year, she realized she wanted to be a writer, 'the Jane Austen of south Alabama,' as she put it. She moved to New York in 1949, when she was 23, and renewed her acquaintance with Truman Persons, who now went by the name Truman Capote. She also made friends with a Broadway composer and his wife, who eventually offered to support her for a year so that she could devote her time to writing. Three years later, she had finished her novel. The opening line of the Washington Post review read, 'A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird.'
She came to Capote's aid once again in 1960, when he went to Kansas to investigate the murders of a small-town family of four. His flamboyant demeanor didn't endear him to the locals, and she was the first to gain their trust. She took volumes of notes on the community, the crime, and the killers, and turned them all over to Truman, but although he dedicated In Cold Blood (1966) to her, he denied her significant contribution to the book.
Lee gave her last interview in 1964, saying that she never expected the success of her novel, and that she was having trouble writing her second. She lives a quiet, private life divided between New York and Monroeville.