Harper Lee

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Harper Lee during the presentation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2007)
Signature of Nelle Lee

Harper Lee , real name Nelle Lee (born April 28, 1926 in Monroeville , Alabama , † February 19, 2016 there ), was an American writer and Pulitzer Prize winner . Her only published book until July 2015, Who the Nightingale disturbs (original title: To Kill a Mockingbird ), sold over 40 million copies.

life and work

Harper Lee was the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee , a lawyer and senator from Alabama to the Democratic Party , and Frances Cunningham Lee, born Finch. Her father's descent from the Southern General Robert Edward Lee is considered unlikely by literature. Her first name Nelle is the backwards written first name of her grandmother Ellen.

Lee earned a high school degree from Monroe County High School in her hometown. As a child she was already inclined to write - in addition to his legal and political work, her father had also been a publisher of a local newspaper, and in early childhood she had met Truman Capote, who was 19 months older and with whom she worked from 1930 to 1932 Had spent summer vacation in Monroeville. Still, Lee decided to study law . The example of her father and her significantly older sister Alice, who also practiced in her father's office from 1943, had persuaded her to do so. From 1944 she first attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery , where her sister had also studied, but in 1945 she moved to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa . There she was - as before in Montgomery - at first an isolated loner, but had the first opportunity to publish short texts and later even became editor-in-chief of the student newspaper Rammer Jammer . She was accepted there also with the Sorority Chi Omega .

In 1948 she received a scholarship for a study trip to the summer course "European Civilization in the 20th Century" in Oxford. In retrospect, she saw the six weeks in the English university town as a “blissful Oxford summer” and “the first open commitment to literature”. After this experience she turned more and more from law, in which she was more interested in human drama than in the technical questions of law, and to literature. At the end of 1948 she finally decided to give up her studies and put this decision into practice in the summer of 1949. Another reason for the final turn to writing is said to have been the success of Truman Capote's debut Other Voices, Other Spaces .

After dropping out of her studies, Lee moved to New York City and worked first in a bookstore and later for some time at the counter of the airlines Eastern Air Lines and BOAC in New York. Through Capote, she met Michael and Joy Brown, with whom she quickly became friends. The Brown couple decided - in order to further Lee's literary ambitions - to finance her living for the year 1957. As early as May 1957, she submitted a manuscript with short stories about life in the southern United States in the 1930s, which were connected via the person of the eponymous main character Atticus , to the publisher J. B. Lippincott. However, the manuscript was considered by Lippincott, who also suggested the stage name Harper to Nelle Lee , and the editor Tay Hohoff as not yet worthy of publication. A large number of the main characters, the lawyer Atticus Finch , who is clearly modeled on Lee's father, the first-person narrator Scout, as the author's alter ego , her brother Jem and holiday guest Dill, wearing the features of Truman Capote, also appear in this first draft in front. Over the next three years, under the influence of Hohoff, she revised the draft and linked the previously loosely related stories with one another. She accepted Hohoff's advice to take a strong main theme that could hold the individual narratives together. The model for this main subject was a court case from 1933 about the rape of a white person by a black person.

Under the new title To Kill a Mockingbird ( Who disturbs the nightingale ) Lee's novel was published in 1960 and received the Pulitzer Prize the following year . In 1962 he was filmed by Robert Mulligan with Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus Finch, for which Peck received an Oscar (the film got three in total). Truman Capote has occasionally indicated that parts of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird were written by him. Pearl Kazin Bell, a publishing editor at Harper’s , thinks this claim is plausible because Harper Lee did not publish any more novels afterwards - which, according to her own statement, is because any successor work would be overshadowed by the first success. Lavizzari considers the evidence of Capote's collaboration on Lee's novel to be rather weak and believes that the refutation of this rumor, which Capote likes to spread, is as impossible as its confirmation.

From the late 1950s to the 1960s, Harper Lee assisted her childhood friend and vacation neighbor Truman Capote with the research for his novel Kaltblütig (original title: In Cold Blood ), which is also dedicated to her. Following the publication of the novel, an estrangement between Lee and Capote seems to have occurred, possibly because Harper Lee did not see her work on the novel adequately appreciated.

In 1961, Harper Lee published two magazine articles: Love - In Other Words in Vogue and Christmas To Me in McCall’s . Another essay, When Children Discover America , was published in McCall’s in 1965 . She was inducted into the National Council of Arts by President Johnson (June 1966). In 1983 she attended the Alabama History and Heritage Festival in Eufaula, Alabama. There she presented the essay Romance and High Adventure .

In 2007 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Harper Lee presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom with President George W. Bush in 2007

In February 2015, 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird , their publisher Penguin Random House announced the publication of a second novel entitled Go Set a Watchman . However, it is not a new text or a sequel, but rather the early version of Wer die Nachtigall, originally submitted to J. B. Lippincott in 1957 , which, however, takes place 20 years after the final version as the main character Jean Louise of New York Alabama returns to visit her father. The manuscript, believed to be lost, was allegedly discovered in Lee's archives at the end of 2014. However, the circumstances surrounding the publication of Go Set a Watchman were considered controversial, as it was often doubted to what extent Harper Lee, who suffered from health problems after a stroke, could agree to the decision to publish it. The book had an initial circulation of two million. In Germany, the first edition is 100,000 copies.

Harper Lee lived very secluded in a retirement home in Monroeville. One of her rare public appearances was when she received the Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award in May 2005. In 2007 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom , the highest civilian honor in the United States. According to her family, Harper Lee died in his sleep on February 19, 2016, at the age of 89.

Representation in the film

Works

literature

  • Roy Newquist (Ed.): Counterpoint. Rand McNally , Chicago 1964.
  • William T. Going: Truman Capote. Harper Lee's Fictional Portrait of the Artist as an Alabama Child. In: Alabama Review. 42, pp. 136-149 (1989).
  • Mark Childress : Looking for Harper Lee. In: Southern Living. Issue May 1997, pp. 148-150.
  • Charles J. Shields : Mockingbird - A Portrait of Harper Lee. Holt, New York 2006, ISBN 0-8050-7919-X .
  • Alexandra Lavizzari : Shine and Shadow. Truman Capote and Harper Lee - a friendship. Edition Ebersbach, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-938740-90-3 .
  • Marja Mills: The mockingbird next door: life with Harper Lee. Penguin Press, New York 2014, ISBN 978-1-594-20519-4 .
  • Hermann Weber : Jurists as non-German writers: (Nelle) Harper Lee. In: Neue Juristische Wochenschrift , issue 11/2013, pp. 743–748.
  • Hermann Weber: Jurists as non-German writers: Once again (Nelle) Harper Lee. In: Neue Juristische Wochenschrift, issue 11/2016, pp. 765–769. (At the same time, Harper Lee discussed : Go there, put a guard. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Munich 2015.)
  • Hans-Georg Schede Ed .: To Kill a Mockingbird. Analysis, interpretation. With table of contents, Abitur exercises with solutions, in English. King's Explanations , Bange-Verlag , Hollfeld 2017 (new edition) ISBN 3804420427

Web links

Commons : Harper Lee  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Harper Lee, author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' dies at age 89. In: Fox31 Denver. February 19, 2016 (English).
  2. ^ Ann Hellmuth: Walking in Harper Lee's shoes ( Memento from September 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). In: Orlando Sentinel . June 11, 2006 (English, "Thirty million copies of To Kill a Mockingbird have been sold since that coming-of-age novel, about a Southern lawyer who believed that no man should be denied justice because of the color of his skin, was first published in 1960 to critical acclaim. ").
  3. ↑ a b feb / AP: Predecessor of “Wer die Nachtigall”: Harper Lee's debut comes out 60 years late . In: Spiegel Online . 3rd February 2015.
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h Hermann Weber : Jurists as non-German writers: (Nelle) Harper Lee. In: New legal weekly . Issue 11/2013, pp. 743-748.
  5. ↑ Eric Homberger: Harper Lee obituary . In: The Guardian . February 19, 2016, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed February 23, 2016]).
  6. ↑ Quoted from Lavizzari: Shine and Shade. 2009, p. 62.
  7. ↑ Lavizzari: Shine and Shadow. 2009, p. 63.
  8. ↑ Lavizzari: Shine and Shadow. 2009, p. 151.
  9. ↑ So at least Shields: Mockingbird. 2006, p. 253.
  10. ↑ Members: Harper Lee. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 8, 2019 .
  11. ^ Alison Flood, Paul Lewis: Harper Lee to publish new novel, 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird. In: The Guardian . February 3, 2015, accessed February 3, 2015 .
  12. ↑ Michiko Kakutani: Review: Harper Lee's 'Go Set a Watchman' Gives Atticus Finch a Dark Side. In: The New York Times . July 10, 2015 (English).
  13. ↑ Harper Lee: Can a Writer Never Stop? In: Zeit Online. February 20, 2016, accessed February 20, 2016 .
  14. ↑ Harper Lee - The Nightingale Will Never Sing Again. In: sueddeutsche.de. February 19, 2016, accessed April 28, 2018 .
  15. ↑ The mirror. No. 30, July 18, 2015.
  16. ^ Fritz Göttler: Literary sensation. The return of the nightingale. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . February 4, 2015, accessed February 6, 2015.
  17. ↑ Ulrich Rüdenauer: Harper Lee: Alabamas Jane Austen. In: Zeit Online . July 15, 2015, accessed February 20, 2016.
  18. ↑ The mirror. No. 30, July 18, 2015, p. 111.
  19. ↑ Todd Leopold: Harper Lee, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' author, dead at 89. In: cnn.com. Cable News Network , February 20, 2016, accessed February 21, 2016 .
  20. ↑ Review see below section Literature, Hermann Weber
  21. ↑ Produce further reading aids for the book: Ernst Klett Verlag , with vocabulary supplement; Cornelsen Verlag , text volume with annotations as a supplement; Stark Publishing House ; as well as several English or US publishers. Abitur topic in the federal states of Hesse and Lower Saxony in 2018
personal data
SURNAME Lee, Harper
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lee, Nelle Harper (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and Pulitzer Prize winner (1961)
DATE OF BIRTH April 28, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Monroeville , Alabama , United States
DATE OF DEATH 19th February 2016
Place of death Monroeville , Alabama , United States