Happy Birthday, Harper Lee!

We all know and love Harper Lee as the writer of To Kill a Mockingbird.  If you are interested in her biography and her influence on contemporary authors, I highly recommend the documentary Hey Boo and Charles Shield's very readable biography Mockingbird.  To whet your appetite, here are a few little known facts about Ms. Lee.

• A rough-and-tumble child, Harper Lee frequently defended her less rambunctious friend Truman Capote in the schoolyard.
• Harper Lee’s mother was Frances Cunningham Finch. Lee uses all three of her mother’s names for characters in To Kill a Mockingbird.
• She studied for a law career, but in 1950 headed to New York to embark on a life of writing.
• Because she writes so slowly, Lee has referred to herself as "more a rewriter than a writer."
• Lee is reportedly working on her memoirs (fingers crossed!)