Lee) and Frances Finch Lee. The family lived in the sleepy little town of Monroeville, Alabama. After graduating from Monroeville's public schools, Lee spent a year (1944-1945) at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, and then attended the University of Alabama for four years (1945-1949), including a year as an exchange student at Oxford University. She left the University of Alabama in 1950, six months short of a law degree, to pursue a writing career in New York City.
Harper Lee became interested in writing at the age of seven. While she was a student at the University of Alabama, her satires, editorial columns, and reviews appeared in campus publications.
Living in New York in the early 1950s and supporting herself by working as an airline reservations clerk, she approached a literary agent with the manuscripts of two essays and three short stories. The agent encouraged her to expand one of the stories into a novel which later became To Kill a Mockingbird.
With the financial help of friends, she gave up her job and moved into a cold-water flat where she devoted herself to her writing. Although her father became ill and she was forced to divide her time between New York and Monroeville, she continued to work on her novel.
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