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Harper Lee: Life of a Writer 3 Walter Lett, a black man, was accused of rape by a white woman, found guilty without viable evidence, and eventually died four years later in an institution for the insane. Another event in 1934, when Nelle Harper was eight, was likely to have stuck in her mind: a mob of rowdy Klansmen marched past her house to the Monroeville courthouse and was con- fronted by her father, Amasa. Nelle Harper graduated from high school in 1944. Even though there are hints that she didn’t particularly enjoy her classes, she developed a friendship with one of her teachers, Ida Gaillard, with whom she kept in contact until Gaillard’s death. Another teacher and mentor was Gladys Watson-Burkett, who lived across the street from the Lees, was an avid gardener, and thus may have been a model for the fictional Miss Maudie. Huntingdon College After high school, Nelle Harper enrolled in Huntingdon College for Women in Montgomery, Alabama. She had at least one good teacher there, made some friends, and acquired a not unjust reputation as a funny and caring but unusual young woman. The school was strong in the liberal arts, but its stress on religion and its main goal to educate girls to be ladies and wives was not a good fit for Nelle Harper. Citing her two contributions to the Huntingdon literary journal, The Prelude, her biographer Charles Shields notes that one story, “The Nightmare,” is about the hanging of a black man and the other about a noble judge in the trial of eight black men, which resonates with Judge James E. Horton of the Scottsboro trials (80). The University of Alabama After her freshman year at Huntingdon, Nelle Harper transferred to the University of Alabama, living for only a year in the Chi Omega sorority house before moving into a dormitory. With the obvious encouragement of her father and Alice, her older sister who was an attorney, she pursued a journalism major with a prelaw emphasis, and wrote for the main campus student publication, the The Crimson White, and the humorous, satirical journal, the Rammer Jammer. Here she published a number of articles including some on the racism of voting laws and contemporary writers and “the Negro problem.” In 1946–47, she became editor of the Rammer Jammer. She wrote a play for the October edition, satirizing a Southern politician who announces that “Our very lives are being threatened by the hordes of evildoers full of sin . . . SIN, between ourselves and our colored friends,” and who argues for creating stricter voting requirements based on