Happy Birthday to Harper Lee
Can you imagine a world in which there is no To Kill a Mockingbird? How about In Cold Blood?
April 28, 2021, marked the birthday of Harper Lee, who would have been 95 if she were still alive. Notwithstanding the supposed lack of awareness of America’s youth as to literary classics, ask any teenage student in the states of Georgia and Alabama (and probably Mississippi) about Harper Lee. Most of them know that she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, and many of them remember eating a delicious Lane cake at the end of the novel study in 8th grade. For someone who, for a long time, was thought to have only written one book, she is certainly a literary icon.
Lee published two books in her lifetime: To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Go Set a Watchman (2015).To Kill a Mockingbird made Harper Lee fabulously wealthy—but she led a most frugal life.
She played a key role in Truman Capote’s true-crime masterpiece ‘In Cold Blood’.She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 for her contribution to literature.
RECENT AWARDSPresidential Medal of Freedom
2007Quill Award for Audio book
2007Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
taken from–1961Images: www.gettyimages.com. Data: en.wikipedia.org · www.reuters.com · www.biography.com · www.rd.com ·
To find out more about Lee’s relationship with Truman Capote, click on the link below:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/14-thinghttps://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/14-things-you-didnt-know-about-harper-lee-and-truman-capotes-you-didnt-know-about-harper-lee-and-truman-capote
My book group read Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by New Yorker writer Casey Cep last year. It was a fascinating account of Lee’s attempt to write another book, a la In Cold Blood. She could never put it together but spent years working on it. Well worth the read if you like non-fiction.
Thank you, Bettie. This is fascinating news. I will look into getting the book.