When I read an author fact recently, that Harper Lee’s friends gathered the money for her to not work for a year, allowing her to write To Kill a Mockingbird, I was shocked to read the word “her”. We were assigned to read that amazing book in school and no teacher ever mentioned that a woman wrote it. My daughter had the same feeling of shock, having spent much of her life with the notion that the author was male.
Friend Truman Capote took this photo. Harper Lee helped with the writing of Capote’s novel, In Cold Blood.
Though To Kill a Mockingbird won a Pullitzer Prize, Lee only published one other book in her lifetime, and to say she published it is a stretch. Publishers, discovering the existence of the first draft of Mockingbird, insisted on billing it as a sequel, titled Go Set a Watchman. Lee opposed its publication in 2015, a year before her death. The publishers embellished it by using passages from Mockingbird. It was the most pre-ordered book since the seventh Harry Potter.
Harper was her pen name. In fact, it was her middle name, named after a doctor who saved her sister’s life. She went by her first name, Nelle, her grandmother’s name spelled backward. She was the youngest of four. Her mom was a homemaker, her dad a former newspaper editor, businessman, and lawyer who served on the state legislature. Since Harper Lee basically disappeared from the publishing scene after her one-book-wonder, the Wikipedia article on her is mostly about the controversy around publishing her second book. Ursula LeGuin wrote about it, “for all its faults and omissions, [Watchman] asks some of the hard questions To Kill a Mockingbird evades.”
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Marie Judson 
I didn’t realize I had gone over to the Watchman page and missed reading a lot about her later life! Truman Capote was Lee’s neighbor! She based the friend in the book on him, and he has a character in his book based on her! Asked why she never published again, she told an Australian journalist, “”Two reasons: one, I wouldn’t go through the pressure and publicity I went through with To Kill a Mockingbird for any amount of money. Second, I have said what I wanted to say, and I will not say it again.” She started two other books but set them aside, though she lived to almost ninety.
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I was shocked to find out it was written by a woman. Women have been using gender-fluid names for a long time to get around discrimination in the publishing world. Think of all the female fantasy writers using just their first initials. I’m not sure if that’s the case for Harper. Maybe she just preferred Harper. I don’t know if she was a lesbian, but she was certainly gender non-conforming.https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2016/2/25/truth-about-harper-lee
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Janet, thank you for this response and the link to the article. I feel a bit foolish that I’ve been unaware of this flurry of speculation around Harper Lee. But I don’t always keep up on the collective conversation. I’ve signed up to get the Advocate news. And I want to read those biographies the article mentions.
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