Biography on Harper Lee

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Biography Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926. Her parents were Frances Cummington Finch Lee and Amasa Coleman Lee. Harper was born and raised in a small Alabama town of Monroeville. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and an intelligent reader, and she enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, Truman Capote. Which leads me to how Harper Lee has always claimed that her novel “To Kill A Mockingbird” was not autobiographical. However, there are a number of similarities to Lee’s life and the life of Scout and Atticus Finch. Harper Lee’s mother was Frances Cunningham Finch. Lee uses all three of her mother’s names for characters in ”To Kill A Mockingbird”. Lee based the characters Scout and Atticus Finch to her mother’s last name. As she was thinking about characters for her novel she choose her mother’s last name to be a part of the main characters name so she would not have an important person in her life left out. When Lee was in school, she met a boy named Truman Capote. Truman was a schoolmate of Lee, as well as her neighbor. Lee and Truman got very close and the two bonded instantly. Lee based her character of Dill, the oddly articulate child, on her good friend Truman. Their friendship was so strong; Lee had the impression while writing her novel to put her best friend as one of her main characters in the novel. Harper Lee’s father was a lawyer like Scout’s father. Lee’s father once defended two black men, a father and son, who were accused of murdering a white store clerk. Like Atticus Finch, he was unable to secure an acquittal for his defendants and the two men were hanged. Soon after, he left criminal law to become a title lawyer. Lee decided while writing ”To Kill A Mockingbird” that her dad had to be related to the book somehow so she choose her father to be one of the main characters, Atticus Finch. Monroeville, the town where Lee lived in,
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