50 Fun Facts About Harper Lee

Who narrates To Kill a Mockingbird?

Like Lee, the tomboy Scout is the daughter of a respected small-town Alabama attorney.

In which decade was To Kill a Mockingbird published?

It came out on July 11, 1960 and was an immediate bestseller.

Which award did Lee's novel win in 1961?

It also won the Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews that year.

What was Lee's hometown?

Truman Capote spent summers there with relatives from 1928 to 1934.

What was Lee's actual first name?

It was her grandmother's name Ellen spelled backwards.

Lee's middle name honoured a pediatrician who had done what?

Dr. William W. Harper of Selma saved her sister Louise.

Why did Lee publish under "Harper Lee" rather than her first name?

She feared Nelle would be misread as Nellie.

What was Lee's father's profession?

He also edited a newspaper and sat in the Alabama legislature, and once defended two black men accused of murder.

What happened to the two black clients Lee's father once defended on murder charges?

The father and son were accused of killing a white storekeeper.

Which Confederate general was Lee related to through her father?

She was a member of the prominent Lee family of Virginia.

Which famous writer was Lee's childhood friend and neighbour?

He inspired the character of Dill, and she inspired a character in his first novel.

Which character in the novel was based on her childhood friend from next door?

Lee in turn was the model for Idabel in Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Which Capote book did Lee help research in Holcomb, Kansas?

They thought it would be an article about a small town's response to a family's murder.

What did Lee study for several years at the University of Alabama?

She left one semester short of a degree, to her father's disappointment.

Lee wrote for the University of Alabama's humour magazine, called what?

She also wrote for the campus newspaper, The Crimson White.

At which English university did Lee attend a 1948 summer school paid for by her father?

He hoped it would revive her interest in law; it did not.

What jobs did Lee take after moving to New York in 1949?

She wrote in her spare time and found an agent, Maurice Crain, in 1956.

What Christmas gift from friends in 1956 let Lee write full-time?

The note read: You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please.

Who was Lee's editor at Lippincott who guided the book through its drafts?

She called the first manuscript more a series of anecdotes than a novel.

What was the title of the manuscript Lee first delivered to her agent in 1957?

It was reworked over two years into To Kill a Mockingbird.

Biographer Charles Shields says Lee once did what with her manuscript in frustration?

Her editor told her to march outside immediately and pick up the pages.

On what date was To Kill a Mockingbird published?

It was an immediate bestseller.

Roughly how many copies of To Kill a Mockingbird are in print?

Library Journal readers voted it Best Novel of the Century in 1999.

Which 1931 trial may also have shaped the novel's social conscience?

The interracial rape case became a landmark of the Jim Crow era.

Who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1962 film?

Lee called it one of the best translations of a book to film ever made.

Who won an Oscar for playing Scout's father in the 1962 film?

Peck's grandson Harper Peck Voll is named after Lee.

Which Peck relative is named after Harper Lee?

The two families became close after the film.

How did Lee's father sign autographs after the novel's success?

He was thrilled with her success and died in April 1962.

What was the working title of the follow-up novel Lee abandoned?

She filed it away unfinished and published nothing more until 2015.

Lee's unfinished 1978 book The Reverend was about what?

It was set around Alexander City; she set it aside when unsatisfied.

To which body did President Lyndon Johnson appoint Lee in 1966?

The same year she wrote a letter defending her novel against a Virginia school board ban.

Which school board tried to ban the novel as "immoral literature" in 1966?

Lee replied that she had yet to see a better example of doublethink.

What was the Beadle Bumble scheme, which gave away copies of the novel?

James J. Kilpatrick of The Richmond News Leader gave away 81 copies in its first week.

Which president gave Lee the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007?

Obama followed with the National Medal of Arts in 2010.

What did Lee say when declining to speak at the 2007 Alabama Academy of Honor ceremony?

She granted almost no interviews for the last 55 years of her life.

Which university's seniors saluted Lee with copies of her novel at a 2006 degree ceremony?

The graduating seniors held the books up during the ceremony.

Lee's 2006 letter about her love of books was published where?

She wrote that in a world of laptops and iPods she still plodded along with books.

In 2013 Lee sued to regain what from her former agent's son-in-law?

She said she had been duped into signing it over in 2007 while her sight and hearing declined.

Which hometown institution did Lee sue over Mockingbird souvenirs?

The case over T-shirts and mugs was settled in February 2014.

Who found the 2015 novel's manuscript in Lee's safe-deposit box?

The find was announced just months after sister Alice's death, stirring controversy.

Which publisher released Lee's second novel in 2015?

Harper & Row had bought Lippincott back in 1978.

In the 2015 novel, Scout returns to Maycomb from which city?

She finds her father, the town's moral watchman, holds racist views.

What did an Alabama state investigation in 2015 look into regarding Lee?

It found claims of coercion and elder abuse unfounded; her lawyer said she was happy as hell.

What did three Polish academics use to test who wrote Lee's two novels?

They concluded the same person wrote both, though Capote may have helped with Mockingbird's opening chapters.

What was the 2025 posthumous Harper Lee collection called?

It gathered eight early short stories and eight essays, with an introduction by Casey Cep.

Which actress earned an Oscar nomination for playing Lee in the film Capote?

Sandra Bullock played her a year later in Infamous.

How old was Lee when she died in February 2016?

She died in her sleep in Monroeville, where her funeral was held the next day.

Which newspaper sued to have Lee's will made public after her death?

Unsealed in 2018, it left most of her assets to a trust formed in 2011.

Lee told a minister she never wrote again partly because she would not go through what?

Her second reason: I have said what I wanted to say, and I will not say it again.

For how many years did Lee keep a part-time home on East 82nd Street in Manhattan?

It was near her childhood friend Capote, though the friendship eventually petered out.