19 Things You Never Knew About Harper Lee and “To Kill a Mockingbird”

Southerner Harper Lee, who passed away on Feb. 19, 2016, continues to be one of America’s most famous and beloved authors, despite having written only one book, To Kill a Mockingbird, until her long-awaited second novel, Go Set a Watchman, was published in 2015.

Not long after Mockingbird‘s release in 1960, Lee stopped giving interviews. Her last public appearance was in July 2015, celebrating the release of her book at a luncheon in her beloved hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. From then on, until her death, she resided in an assisted-living facility there. Here, find some interesting To Kill a Mockingbird facts and tidbits you might not know about the elusive author and the beloved novel that has nabbed a spot on almost every Best Books list.

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1. Harper Lee’s real name was Nelle Harper Lee

Her parents chose Nelle as a tribute to her maternal grandmother, Ellen (Nelle is Ellen spelled backward). Her family called her Nelle Harper; her friends, Nelle. But she opted for Harper Lee for her author’s name because she didn’t want people to mispronounce her name as “Nellie” (it should rhyme with “bell”).

2. To Kill a Mockingbird once beat the Bible

While the Bible has vastly outsold Lee’s novel—worldwide, more than 5 billion copies vs. more than 40 million—it came in No. 2 to Mockingbird in a 2009 survey in which respondents picked the most inspirational book of all time.

3. To Kill a Mockingbird made Harper Lee fabulously wealthy—but she led a mostly frugal life

Information on her finances is scarce, but according to a NewYorker.com article, Lee earned an eye-popping $816,448.06 in royalties from Mockingbird in the first six months of 2010. What did she spend it on? Very little. She would make regular trips to the laundromat because she and her oldest sister, Alice—with whom she shared a home—did not own a washing machine. Other things she lived without: air conditioning, computers and cell phones. For all her correspondence and writing, she used a manual typewriter. As for all that money? Lee was known to make numerous secret donations to her local Methodist church and to charities.

4. Until 2007, Harper Lee split her years between Monroeville, Alabama, and New York City

In New York, she kept an apartment on the Upper East Side. She liked going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and rooting for the Mets. She also enjoyed the occasional trip to Atlantic City to play the slots. Due to her mistrust of air travel—from when she worked as an airline reservations clerk pre-Mockingbird and learned about the accidents that could happen—she always took Amtrak between Alabama and New York.

5. She had some favorite activities when home in Monroeville

Harper Lee had some favorite outdoor activities when she was in Monroeville. These included fishing, feeding ducks and geese at a local pond, and drinking coffee at McDonald’s.

6. Harper Lee had a handful of favorite authors

Harper was known to admire William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Jane Austen and Thomas Macaulay. In a 1964 radio interview, Harper said, “All I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”

7. Harper Lee was an Anglophile

She studied for one happy summer at Oxford University in the U.K. Back in Alabama, she and Alice subscribed to many British publications: the Spectator, the Weekly Telegraph and the Times Literary Supplement. They read U.S. magazines too, including the New York Times Book Review, New York, Newsweek and Vanity Fair.

8. Harper and Alice were ardent college football fans

Since Harper had gone to the University of Alabama, the sisters cheered for the Crimson Tide. They also liked watching pro golf, especially the Masters.

9. To Kill a Mockingbird was slowly and painstakingly written

Lee said she spent 6 to 12 hours a day at her desk, and she’d produce one manuscript page of text per day. “Contrary to what most people think, there is no glamour to writing. In fact, it’s heartbreak most of the time,” she told a class at Sweet Briar College in the late 1960s, according to Charles Shields’s unauthorized biography Mockingbird.

10. Harper Lee initially wanted Atticus Finch to be played by Spencer Tracy in the movie version of Mockingbird

Lee sent a letter asking Tracy to take on the role, but through his agent, he said that he was too busy on another film. After Gregory Peck was cast, she came to adore him. Before the 1963 Oscars, when he was nominated for Best Actor, she sent him her father’s prized pocket watch, engraved with “To Gregory from Harper.” She and Peck remained friends until he passed away in 2003. The movie is now considered a classic adaptation.

11. Harper Lee and Truman Capote were childhood friends

The two met when he was sent to stay with aunts who lived next door to the Lees. He was two years older than Harper, and they wrote together after Harper’s father bought the children a typewriter to share. She based the Mockingbird character Dill on Capote (shown here in 1968).

12. She played a key role in Truman Capote’s true-crime masterpiece In Cold Blood

After Capote was assigned by an editor at the New Yorker to write about the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Kansas, he asked Lee to assist him. She’d just handed in To Kill a Mockingbird and was awaiting its publication. She accompanied him to Kansas, where they spent two months conducting interviews. Capote dubbed her his “assistant researchist.” She returned to the state with him at least three more times, including covering the trial of murderers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith.  She was close enough to Hickock and Smith that they requested her presence at their 1965 execution; while Capote did attend, she declined.

13. But In Cold Blood ended up driving them apart

She and Capote became estranged, in part because she felt that he never gave her adequate credit for her work on his bestseller. And she was furious after he told his biographer that her mother, Frances Lee, twice tried to drown her when she was young—something she and Alice both said was a lie. His substance abuse further exacerbated their rift.

14. She began writing her own true-crime book

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, she spent a couple of years researching an In Cold Blood–style account of part-time preacher W.M. Maxwell, who was suspected of murdering five people close to him and profiting from their insurance policies. Writer Marja Mills wrote in her book Mockingbird Next Door, “Nelle told me that her research uncovered information she believed put her in personal jeopardy. She would not elaborate.”

15. Harper Lee was able to see herself on screen in two Truman Capote biopics, 2005’s Capote and 2006’s Infamous

She thought Philip Seymour Hoffman’s depiction of Capote was “uncanny” but called the movie “historical fiction.” She liked Infamous—in which she was portrayed by Sandra Bullock—enough to write director Douglas McGrath. As reported in Mills’s book, Harper told him, “You have created a creature of such sweetness and light and called her Harper Lee that I forgive the socks” (referring to the fact that he chose to have Bullock as Lee wear black pumps with white socks).

16. Some 30,000 tourists visit Monroeville, Alabama, each year

Despite knowing they’ll never see Ms. Lee herself, visitors still want to walk through the town that inspired her fictional community of Maycomb. The old courthouse (shown here) now houses a museum with two permanent exhibits: “Truman Capote: A Childhood in Monroeville” and “Harper Lee: In Her Own Words.” You can also walk through the courtroom. While the Mockingbird movie was not filmed there, set designers created an exact replica of it for the film. Every summer, a stage version of To Kill a Mockingbird is performed in the town. The second half takes place in the courtroom, with theatergoers sitting in the room’s audience seats as if they were watching an actual trial.

17. Harper Lee loved to laugh

Writer Marja Mills lived next door to Alice and Harper for more than a year in the 2000s, and Mills would borrow films on Netflix for the three women to watch. Some of the movies they enjoyed were Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, Wallace and Gromit, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Fargo, Heaven Help Us and Waiting for Guffman.

18. The origins of Go Set a Watchman are murky

The manuscript of Go Set a Watchman, one of the bestselling books of the decade, was said to have been discovered by Harper Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter. It was written before Mockingbird, but featured an older Scout in the 1950s (versus 1930s Mockingbird). According to Charles Shields’s biography, Go Set a Watchman was Lee’s initial title for To Kill a Mockingbird. Her editor thought it was too oblique, and they re-named it Atticus before changing it again. The state of Alabama conducted an elder abuse investigation into Harper Lee and her affairs but found her “in full possession of her mental faculties.”

19. Harper Lee said of Mockingbird, “I wish I’d never written the damn thing”

Lee once expressed her regrets to writer Mills in those words. A few years later, Mills reminded her of that remark about the classic book and asked if she still felt the same way. Harper replied, “Sometimes. But then it passes.”

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