Harper Lee (1926 – 2016)

Born in Monroeville, Alabama, she studied law at the University of Alabama, then spent a year in the United Kingdom, studying at Oxford. Living in New York City, she supported herself working as an airline reservation clerk, but was soon determined to pursue a career in writing. She left her job and put together a series of short stories about life in the South, which she first submitted for publication in 1957. Encouraged by her editor, she worked the stories into a novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which was a critically acclaimed best-seller. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her work in 1961.

After the success of her book, Lee felt that if she wrote another it would be anticlimactic and apparently retired from writing.

In the mid-60s she traveled and worked with her childhood friend Truman Capote as a research assistant for his novel, In Cold Blood. Capote dedicated the novel to her.

She made infrequent appearances and received a number of honors, but stayed out of the limelight for decades.

Go Set a Watchman, a sequel to her masterpiece, was published in 2015 under a great deal of controversy and debate, both for the content of the book and the circumstances under which it was published. She passed away on February 19, 2016, in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.