Harper Lee (Up Close) - Hardcover

Madden-Lunsford, Kerry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670010952 ISBN 13: 9780670010950

Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers, 2009

Synopsis

Read Kerry Madden's posts on the Penguin Blog.

Nelle Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and became an instant bestseller. Two years later it was an Academy Award– winning film. Today, it remains standard—and beloved—reading in English classes. But Lee never wanted “the book” to define who she was, which explains her aversion to any kind of publicity. Kerry Madden conducted extensive research for this Up Close biography, which reveals Lee to be a down-to-earth Southern woman who prefers to live simply, like her neighbors do, despite the fact that she is a treasured literary legend. Madden’s in-depth biography is now more relevant than ever: 2015’s historic release of Go Set a Watchman—written by Lee before To Kill a Mockingbird and lost for decades—has thrust Lee and her work back into the spotlight.

A Booklist Top Ten Biography of 2009

A Kirkus Best Book of 2009

About this title

About the Author:

Kerry Madden (www.kerrymadden.com) is the author of the Appalachian Maggie Valley Trilogy: Gentle's Holler, Louisiana's Song, and Jessie's Mountain (all Viking). Her other books include Offsides, a 1997 New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age selection, Writing Smarts, which helps kids craft their own stories and poetry, and Nothing Fancy About Kathryn & Charlie, about a Selma, Alabama friendship between a storyteller and a folk artist. Kerry is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Alabama Birmingham and also teaches at Antioch University in Los Angeles and at the Sewanee Young Writers Conference in Tennessee. The mother of three grown children, she divides her time between Birmingham and Los Angeles.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* From the Up Close series, this informative biography spotlights writer Harper Lee, who grew up in Monroeville, Alabama, and studied law in college before deciding to become a writer. After working and writing in New York City for many years, she found a publisher for her first novel. Her life was transformed by the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), which quickly became a best-seller, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the basis for an unusually successful movie adaptation. Though Lee appreciated the critical acclaim, she found the unrelenting demands for interviews, public appearances, and personal contact increasingly unwelcome and withdrew. Given the writer’s refusal to grant access to any biographer and her closest friends’ and relatives’ reluctance to discuss her, Madden has done a fine job of researching the novelist’s life and presenting it with respect for her point of view. The sensitive treatment of race relations during Lee’s youth and the section on three trials that may have inspired parts of her novel will interest students researching To Kill a Mockingbird. A lengthy acknowledgments section, source notes for the many quotes, and an extensive bibliography conclude this unusually readable biography of an elusive figure in American letters. Grades 7-12. --Carolyn Phelan

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0670010952
• ISBN 13: 9780670010950
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224