But to emphasize: Hers was a mostly comfortable and congenial upbringing, far less strange than that of Scout Finch, not to mention that of Boo Radley. Nelle would never marry, but she always had a passel of friends and admirers. She would, by , land in New York City.
Her arc was that of an achiever. She had a particular pal in her youth, and this fact will always fascinate. Nelle and Truman became close friends; much later, she would become commemorated as a character in his novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, and he, now named Truman Capote, would be, as already noted, immortalized as Dill in Mockingbird.
They stayed in touch after moving on from Monroeville. Both continued to write—to each other, and then for millions of others. During the s, she worked on Go Set a Watchman, which could not find a publisher. She then went to work on To Kill a Mockingbird, and in signed a deal and embarked upon a two-year process of rewriting and refining.
Affairs get interesting here. He determined to go to the Midwest and investigate; the fruits of his labors would be his ground-breaking book, In Cold Blood. As he set out on his grand enterprise, he realized that no one was better suited to help him interview the heartland natives than his empathetic-to-the-core friend from Monroeville, Nelle.
And so, even on the verge of her own triumph in literature, she was recruited and went to Kansas with Capote. In her junior year, Lee was accepted into the university's law school, which allowed students to work on law degrees while still undergraduates. The demands of her law studies forced her to leave her post as Rammer Jammer editor.
After her first year in the program, Lee began expressing to her family that writing—not the law—was her true calling. She went to the University of Oxford in England that summer as an exchange student. Returning to her law studies that fall, Lee dropped out after the first semester. She soon moved north to follow her dreams to become a writer.
Author Harper Lee in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama in In , a year-old Lee arrived in New York City. In , the Browns gave Lee an impressive Christmas present—to support her for a year so that she could write full time. She quit her job and devoted herself to her craft. The Browns also helped her find an agent, Maurice Crain. He, in turn, was able to get publisher J. Lippincott Company interested in her work. Working with editor Tay Hohoff, Lee worked on a manuscript set in a small Alabama town, which eventually became her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
Tougher than many of the boys, Lee often stepped up to serve as Truman's childhood protector. Truman, who shared few interests with boys his age, was picked on for being sensitive and for the fancy clothes he wore.
While the two friends were very different, they both had difficult home lives. Truman was living with his mother's relatives in town after largely being abandoned by his own parents. While in New York City in the s, Lee was reunited with her old friend Capote, who was by then one of the literary rising stars of the time. In , Lee joined forces with Capote to assist him with an article he was writing for The New Yorker. Capote was writing about the impact of the murder of four members of the Clutter family on their small Kansas farming community.
The two traveled to Kansas to interview townspeople, friends and family of the deceased and the investigators working to solve the crime. Serving as his research assistant, Lee helped with the interviews, eventually winning over some of the locals with her easygoing, unpretentious manner.
Truman, with his flamboyant personality and style, had a hard time initially getting himself into his subjects' good graces. During their time in Kansas, the Clutters' suspected killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were caught in Las Vegas and brought back for questioning.
Lee and Capote got a chance to interview the suspects not long after their arraignment in January Soon after, Lee and Capote returned to New York. She worked on the galleys for her forthcoming first novel while he started working on his article, which would evolve into the nonfiction masterpiece In Cold Blood. The pair returned to Kansas for the murder trial. Lee gave Capote all of her notes on the crime, the victims, the killers, the local communities and much more.
Lee worked with Capote on and off on In Cold Blood. She had been invited by Smith and Hickock to witness their execution in , but she declined.
When Capote's book was finally published in , a rift developed between the two collaborators for a time. Capote dedicated the book to Lee and his longtime lover, Jack Dunphy, but failed to acknowledge her contributions to the work. While Lee was very angry and hurt by this betrayal, she remained friends with Capote for the rest of his life.
She also worked on and off with her friend Capote on his famed book, In Cold Blood A condensed version of the story appeared in Reader's Digest magazine. The following year, the novel won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and several other literary awards. A classic of American literature, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages with more than a million copies sold each year.
The work's central character, a young girl nicknamed Scout, was not unlike Lee in her youth. In one of the book's major plotlines, Scout and her brother Jem and their friend Dill explore their fascination with a mysterious and somewhat infamous neighborhood character named Boo Radley. Truman and Nelle become fast friends.
While in college, she edits a humor magazine, Rammer-Jammer, and writes for the college newspaper, the Crimson-White. Lippincott Company in She is asked to rewrite the manuscript. Capote eventually turns the work into a non-fiction narrative book, In Cold Blood.
July 11, To Kill a Mockingbird is published by J. Lippincott Company. The book is an instant critical and commercial success, and the local bookseller in Monroeville quickly sells ou t her stock.
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