By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Nelle Harper Lee—the author of my favorite book—was born one hundred years ago this April. It’s been quite a century!
Born in Monroeville, Alabama on April 28, 1926, Lee’s father (Amasa Coleman or A.C.) was a lawyer, newspaperman, and state legislator who descended from General Robert E. Lee. Her mother (Frances) was a homemaker with frail health but with the strong last name of Finch. (Does that surname sound familiar?)
Lee grew up in the post-Civil-War but pre-Civil-Rights Jim Crow era. She watched keenly as her family, friends, neighbors, and strangers navigated the racial tensions, conflicts, and contradictions of the old American South.
Like any kid, however, she also just played. One of her childhood friends was a small but precocious boy about her age who visited his own relatives in Monroeville every summer for several years.
His name was Truman Persons. The world later knew him as Truman Capote.
Lee helped protect the small and eccentric Capote from the town’s bullies, and the imaginative Capote invited and encouraged Lee to write and share stories with him. Sometimes they worked together on a typewriter that Lee’s father gave her.
Before finishing college—and eschewing the legal career her father and older sister chose—Lee moved to New York City in 1949. Capote was already there, skipping college to work as a copy boy for The New Yorker magazine.
During the next two decades, Lee and Capote encouraged and assisted each other as they tried to make it as writers. Capote made suggestions about Lee’s work and Lee was Capote’s main assistant while he wrote his 1965 bestseller In Cold Blood.
That groundbreaking book—which Capote dedicated to Lee without mentioning her contributions to it—is the true account of the murder of a Kansas family and its aftermath. Many consider it the genesis of the true crime writing genre.
During those early years, Lee also worked odd jobs during the day and wrote long into the night. She sold some of her stories to local publications and even developed a cadre of friends and admirers.
As a gift for Christmas in the late 1950s, one couple decided to support Lee financially for a year so she could focus on writing. By 1960, often drawing on characters and events from her own childhood, Lee had created and published her classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
With the Civil Rights movement gaining steam and causing controversy, Lee’s book was the perfect confluence of the right story by the right writer at the right time. It was an instant success and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961.
Lee’s father A.C. inspired the Atticus Finch character in To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus’s son Jem is based on Lee’s own brother Edwin, who died of an aneurysm in 1951.
Scholars believe that Scout from Mockingbird is a combination of Lee and her two sisters. Capote inspired Dill, the next-door neighbor character/boy who joins Jem and Scout in their many Mockingbird adventures.
Capote was proud of the Dill characterization but also jealous of Lee’s literary success. As a result, the two writers were estranged when Capote died in California in 1984.
Lee’s mother died in 1951 of cardiac arrest shortly after she got cancer. Scholars believe Frances Finch Lee also suffered from bi-polar disorder.
This may explain some of the instability Lee reportedly felt during her own childhood. It also could be the reason Atticus Finch is a widower in Mockingbird and why the book depicts the disabled neighbor (Arthur “Boo” Radley) as benevolent but misunderstood.
Lee’s father had a complex history too, as depicted in Lee’s later-published Go Set a Watchman. He was a well-meaning community leader who supported systemic racism but also spoke out against racial violence.
Her father’s views also evolved, and before his death he opposed segregation. Even years later, former neighbors remembered him for his quiet strength, unfailing honesty, and humility.
Although both her parents and brother were gone shortly after Mockingbird was published, Lee stayed close to her remaining family. Her sister Alice—one of the first female lawyers in Alabama and a pioneering Methodist Church leader—was Lee’s legal advisor.
Lee did publish a few of her other writings, but only a few. Right now, I am reading a lovely little collection of her short stories called The Land of Sweet Forever.
In many ways, however, Mockingbird marked both the beginning and end of her distinguished literary career.
A few years before she died in 2016, Lee told a pastor, “I wouldn’t go through the pressure and publicity [again] I went through with To Kill a Mockingbird for any amount of money…I have said what I wanted to say, and I will not say it again.” What she wanted to say was said so well that Lee deserved the money and accolades she received.
There was a lot of both. Unlike most other writers, Lee earned so much in royalties—estimated to be millions of dollars each year—from just her Mockingbird book that she never had to write again in order to eat.
The accolades were equally impressive. The movie version of Mockingbird (which Lee helped write) won Gregory Peck an Oscar.
The Mockingbird book remains in print even today, almost seven decades after the first edition hit the shelves. Teachers often list it as required reading in both high school English courses and on college syllabi.
My colleagues at the University of Notre Dame gave Lee an honorary degree 20 years ago. As then-president Fr. John Jenkins helped Lee don her ceremonial doctoral hood, the graduating seniors stood and saluted her by holding up copies of To Kill a Mockingbird.
In 2007, George W. Bush presented Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom recognizing those who have made “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” Three years later, President Barack Obama awarded Lee the National Medal of Arts for her “outstanding contributions to the excellence, growth, support and availability of the arts.”
I fell in love with To Kill a Mockingbird in high school and again in college, when Lee was in her 50s and living a secluded life in both New York City and Monroeville. I have read the lovely book many times, mentioned it in my law school admission essay, used it in a law school class I taught, and talked about it often with all three of my children.
Like many in my profession, Atticus Finch is one of my jurisprudential north stars. The law heroes I read about in my twenties—Finch and Robert Bolt’s Thomas More (A Man for All Seasons)—still inform my vocation today.
I’ve never had to choose—as did More—between my head and my principles. Nor has a client’s life ever depended on my lawyerly skills, as was the case for Finch.
Yet, I try to let the integrity and devotion of these two book pillars inspire even the mundane bits of advice and counsel I render from my Salt Lake City office at Parsons Behle & Latimer.
The Harper Lee century stands in ironic and marked contrast to celebrity culture today—the social media era—the initial part of which unfolded while Lee was still alive.
Instead of buying an expensive crib, Lee lived in the same one-bedroom New York City apartment for 40 years. Rather than overexposing herself on any available platform, Lee largely stayed behind the scenes to let her writing and characters speak for themselves.
Why? She probably told us in her own words.
It may have been her shy nature or her reserved Southern upbringing. In Mockingbird, she explained, “People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.”
Two decades ago, Lee sent a letter to Oprah Winfrey about Lee’s love of the written word. She inquired, “Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up—some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.”
Lee also asked, “Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn’t know how?” She added, “Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.”
Plod along with books.
The phrase is a remarkable autobiographical distillation of the quiet life of the very famous Nelle Harper Lee.
Today—a hundred years after she was born and ten years after she died—it’s also a wonderful bit of countercultural wisdom and advice from the Harper Lee century.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
