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. Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. She lived a frugal life, traveling between her cold-water-only apartment in New York to her family home in Alabama to care for her father. Lee continued as a reservation clerk until the late 50s, when she devoted herself to writing. Though she did not complete the law degree, she studied 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. While there, she wrote for several student publications and spent a year as editor of the campus humor magazine, 'Ramma-Jamma'. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote.Īfter graduating from high school in Monroeville, Lee enrolled at the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery (1944-45), and then pursued a law degree at the University of Alabama (1945-50), pledging the Chi Omega sorority.

Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who served on the state legislature from 1926 to 1938. Harper Lee, known as Nelle, was born in the Alabama town of Monroeville, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context and new meaning to an American classic. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor and effortless precision-a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in a painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past-a journey that can be guided only by one's conscience. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her.

Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch-'Scout'-returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. From Harper Lee comes a landmark new novel set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Harper lee books go set a watchman