Harper+Lee



**__//Most Notable Works//__** //To Kill A Mockingbird// //Love-In Other Words// //Christmas to Me// //When Children Discover America// //Romance and High Adventures// **__//Special Awards//__** Presidential Medal of Freedom (2007) Pulitzer Prize (1961) Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama (as the youngest of four children) born by the parents of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee who was a news paper editor for a living who she looked up to as slight insperation for her own work, on April 28, 1926 and is still alive today. As a young girl, Lee was a tomboy and loved to read, all of the time. She spent alot of her time with her neigbour and best friend, Truman Capote. She started high school in 1940 at Monroe County High School, and graduated in 1944. Harper Lee attended Huntingdon College 1944-45, studied law at the University of Alabama 1945-49, and studied one year at Oxford University. . She didn't finish her degree, but while attending college, she wrote for many of the schools papers, and the schools humor block, and then moved Oxford University for a year, and finally to New York City, where she worked as a clerk for Eastern Airlaines and BOAC. While most women of this time would have been out looking for a husband, strangely, Lee never married nor had children. After graduating high school, Lee found that she had a newfound interest in literature. As a child, she dreamed of becoming an aspiring author, and wrote for the school's papers during high school. After completing a partial amount of college, she moved to New York city, where she decided to write. After she had completed several long stories, she contacted an agent in November of 1956. On Christmas Day, she received a note stating, " You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas," along with a year's worth of pay. Lee quit her current job, and tried to focus completely on her writing. During that year, she had the first draft of, //To Kill a Mockingbird.// After rewriting the first draft, the book was completed in the summer of 1959 and it was an instant best-seller. It won several awards, such as the //Pulitzer Prize in Fiction// in 1961. The //Pulitzer Prize// is an annual american award thats been given for journalism, literature, and music since 1917. The murder of Emmett Till (1955) is one of several injustices that seem to have inspired events in [|//To Kill a Mockingbird//] (published 1960). Till was a 14-year-old African-American boy brutally murdered by two white men in August 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman in a Mississippi [|grocery] store.
 * Early Life:**
 * Writing, //To Kill a Mockingbird//**