First before I get started I'd like to recommend The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs. It's soon to be a movie, staring Julia Roberts. I did not expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. I highly recommend it to all women. It is about women relationships. Beautiful book.
Now on to the subject of the day, reading schedule and a little about the author. Because I'm a writer, I'm always interested in the author of a book I'm reading. Up until a few months ago, I believed Harper Lee had died. I'm not sure why I thought this; other than she doesn't get mentioned much anymore. That's what I got for thinking. I opened an Oprah magazine and found a letter she had written about reading. She was alive and well. So, how does a writer write one book, a book that takes the biggest prize, the oscar of writing, the Pulitzer, and then basically walk away from writing? Here's what I've found about her. Thought you might be interested to know.
Nelle Harper Lee (born
April 28, 1926) is an
American novelist known for her
Pulitzer Prize–winning 1960 novel
To Kill a Mockingbird, her only major work to date. She was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom of
United States for her contributions to literature in 2007.
Harper Lee, known to friends and family as Nelle, was born in the Alabama town of
Monroeville on
April 28,
1926, the youngest of four children born to Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a
lawyer who also served on the state legislature from 1926 to 1938. As a child, Lee was a
tomboy and a precocious reader, and enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young
Truman Capote.
After graduating from high school in Monroeville,
[2] Lee enrolled first at the all-female
Huntingdon College in
Montgomery (1944-45), and then pursued a law degree at the
University of Alabama (1945-49), pledging the
Chi Omega sorority. While there, she wrote for several student publications and spent a year as editor of the campus humor magazine, Ramma-Jamma. Though she did not complete the requirements for a law degree, she pursued studies for a summer in
Oxford,
England, before moving to
New York in 1950, where she worked as a reservation clerk with
Eastern Air Lines and
BOAC in New York City.
Lee continued working as a reservation clerk until the late 50s, when she resolved to devote herself to writing. She lived a frugal lifestyle, traveling between her
cold-water-only apartment in
New York to her family home in Alabama to care for her ailing father.
Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. The following month at the East 50th townhouse of her friends
Michael Brown and Joy Williams Brown, she received a gift of a year's wages with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas."
[3] Within a year, she had a first draft. Working closely with
J. B. Lippincott & Co. editor Tay Hohoff, she completed
To Kill a Mockingbird in the summer of 1959. Published
July 11,
1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate
bestseller and won her great critical acclaim, including the
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in
1961. It remains a bestseller today, with over 30 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll conducted by the
Library Journal.
Many details of To Kill a Mockingbird are apparently autobiographical. Like Lee, the tomboy Scout is the daughter of a respected small town Alabama attorney. The plot involves a legal case, the workings of which would have been familiar to Lee, who studied law. Scout's friend Dill is commonly supposed to have been inspired by Lee's childhood friend and neighbor,
Truman Capote, while Lee is the model for a character in Capote's first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms.
Harper Lee has downplayed autobiographical parallels of the book. Yet
Truman Capote, mentioning the character Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, described the details he considered biographical: "In my original version of Other Voices, Other Rooms I had that same man living in the house that used to leave things in the trees, and then I took that out. He was a real man, and he lived just down the road from us. We used to go and get those things out of the trees. Everything she wrote about it is absolutely true. But you see, I take the same thing and transfer it into some Gothic dream, done in an entirely different way."
After completing To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee accompanied Capote to
Holcomb, Kansas, to assist him in researching what they thought would be an article on a small town's response to the murder of a farmer and his family. Capote expanded the material into his best-selling book,
In Cold Blood (1966). The experiences of Capote and Lee in Holcomb were depicted in two different films,
Capote (2005) and
Infamous (2006).
Since the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee has granted almost no requests for interviews or public appearances, and with the exception of a few short essays, has published no further writings. She did work on a second novel for years, eventually filing it away unpublished.[
citation needed] During the mid-1980s, she began writing a book of nonfiction about an Alabama serial murderer, but she put it aside when she was not satisfied with the result.[
citation needed] Her withdrawal from public life has prompted persistent but unfounded speculation that new publications are in the works. Similar speculation has followed the American writers
J. D. Salinger and
Ralph Ellison.
Lee said of the 1962
Academy Award–winning
screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird by
Horton Foote: "If the integrity of a
film adaptation can be measured by the degree to which the novelist's intent is preserved, Mr. Foote's screenplay should be studied as a classic."[
citation needed] She also became a close friend of
Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of
Atticus Finch, the father of the novel's narrator, Scout. She remains close to the actor's family. Peck's grandson, Harper Peck Voll, is named after her.
In June 1966, Lee was one of two persons named by President
Lyndon B. Johnson to the
National Council on the Arts.
When Lee attended the 1983 Alabama History and Heritage Festival in
Eufaula, Alabama, she presented the essay "Romance and High Adventure."
Lee has been known to split time between an apartment in New York and her sister's home in Monroeville. She has accepted
honorary degrees but has declined to make speeches. In March 2005, she arrived via Amtrak in Philadelphia — her first trip to the city since signing with publisher Lippincott in 1960 — to receive the inaugural ATTY Award for positive depictions of attorneys in the arts from the Spector Gadon & Rosen Foundation. At the urging of Peck's widow Veronique, Lee traveled by train from Monroeville to
Los Angeles in
2005 to accept the
Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award. She has also attended luncheons for students who have written essays based on her work held annually at the University of Alabama.
[6][7] On
May 21,
2006, she accepted an honorary degree from the
University of Notre Dame. To honor her, the graduating seniors were given copies of Mockingbird before the ceremony and held them up when she received her degree.
In a letter published in
Oprah Winfrey's magazine O (May 2006), Lee wrote about her early love of books as a child and her steadfast dedication to the written word: "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."
While attending an
August 20,
2007 ceremony inducting four new members into the
Alabama Academy of Honor, Lee responded to an invitation to address the audience with "Well, it's better to be silent than to be a fool."
Thanks to Wikipedia for this info.
Reading and Comment schedule: (Comments can be made online through blog or sent to me through email)
April 5th you may comment on chapters 1-7
April 12th comments on chapters 8-15
April 19th comments on chapters 16-22
April 26th comments on chapters 23-31 complete book
April 22th announcing book for May
Okay guys, buy your books and have at it. I look forward to everyone's comments.
Writer Woman
