Harper Lee (born April 28, 1926) is an American novelist, who has published only one novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Born in Monroeville, Alabama on April 28, 1926 as Nelle Harper Lee, she studied law at the University of Alabama, then spent a year in the United Kingdom, studying at Oxford. Living in New York City, she supported herself working as an airline reservation clerk, but was soon determined to pursue a career in writing. She left her job and put together a series of short stories about life in the South, which she first submitted for publication in 1957. Encouraged by her editor, she worked the stories into a novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which was a critically acclaimed best-seller. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her work in 1961.

After the success of her book, Lee felt that if she wrote another it would be anticlimatic. Lee apparently retired from writing.

Truman Capote was a lifelong friend of childhood neighbor Lee, and was allegedly the inspiration for the character of Dill in her best-seller. Capote frequently implied that he himself had written a considerable portion of the novel, and at least one person - Pearl Kazin Bell, an editor at Harper's who cited Lee's failure to ever write again - has gone on record as believing his assertions were true.

In the late-50s and early-60s, Lee worked with Capote as a research assistant for his novel, In Cold Blood, which he dedicated to her.

She makes infrequent appearances and has received a number of honors, but little else is known of what she is doing, fueling speculation (similar to that which has surrounded J.D. Salinger and formerly Ralph Ellison) that she is working on various writing projects, which may or may not be published at some future date.