Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist, renowned for her remarkable novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and went on to become a classic of modern American literature. The plotline and people featured in To Kill A Mockingbird are based loosely on Harper Lee’s own family, neighbors, and events that occurred in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama in the 1930s. In a similar fashion to last week’s artist, William Faulkner, Harper Lee put a spotlight on the deep south and the incredible amount of racism and hatred thrust upon the black community, as well as the large class divides prevalent in the small town of Monroeville, though her lens is through the eyes of two children rather than the perspectives of adults. Strangely enough, over fifty years after the release of To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee released a second novel as a sort of sequel, entitled Go Set A Watchman, which was later confirmed to be To Kill A Mockingbird’s first draft. So, I think you all are thinking what I am when I say…just what the hell happened in those years of absence? Where did Harper Lee go? Who really knew Harper Lee, or better yet, who was truly her friend, and who was not? What, if anything, can we ascertain from the rumors surrounding the publication of Go Set A Watchman, or Harper Lee’s state in her last years, which is highly debated amongst her friends and family? And maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to answer the biggest question of all: why, oh why, did Lee decide never to write again?