Lee traveled to England as an exchange student Oxford University. She left the University of Alabama six months short of completing her law degree, although she later was awarded an honorary degree by that institution. Lee's sister, Alice, did become a lawyer, and later took over their father's practice.
Lee moved to New York City in 1950, and worked for several years as an reservations clerk for Eastern Air Lines and British Overseas Airways. When friends offered to loan her enough money to write full-time for a year, she quit her job and penned the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1957, she submitted the manuscript to a publishing house and began a two-year process of revision.
Travels With Truman Capote
Shortly after Lee finished the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, Truman Capote invited her to accompany him to Garden City, Kansas, in order to provide research for a non-fiction book involving the murder of a farm family. Lee and Capote traced their friendship back to 1928, when Capote moved to Monroeville to live with his aunts, who were the next-door-neighbors of the Lees. Lee based a character in To Kill a Mockingbird on Capote, and he partially based a character in his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, on her.
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