(born 1926), U.S. novelist. Born Nelle Harper Lee on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Ala., Harper Lee studied law for four years at the University of Alabama and spent one year at Oxford University. In the 1950s she was an airline reservation clerk before leaving to devote her time to writing. In 1960 she wrote her first novel, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird', a story narrated by a young Southern girl whose attorney father is defending a black man accused of raping a white woman. It won the Pulitzer prize in 1961. In 1962 the book was adapted into a motion picture.