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Harper Lee: Life of a Writer 13 There are a number of speculations about why Nelle Harper never pub- lished anything else after To Kill a Mockingbird. Her own explanation was that she had said all she wanted to say and, when a writer has reached a peak, as she did with her famous novel, that the rest is all downhill. She, frankly, didn’t want to face the public uproar, painful attention, unavoid- able comparisons, and criticism that another work would inevitably bring. She was also a perfectionist, which may have had something to do with the disappearance of the projects she was working on after To Kill a Mockingbird. Her involvement in the Clutter case and the Alexander City case suggest her interest and talents as a journalist and historian. To all who were close to her, Nelle Harper insisted that she did not want to publish anything nor did she want any biography of hers pub- lished in her lifetime. She did agree, however, to the publication of the 35th anniversary edition of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1995. In 2001 Nelle Harper attended an Honors School conference on To Kill a Mockingbird at the University of Alabama. The Unavoidable Return to Monroeville In 2007, Nelle Harper suffered a debilitating stroke in her home in New York City. She was taken to a hospital in New York, then one in Bir- mingham, Alabama, and finally to an assisted living facility in Monroe­ ville, Alabama, where her sister Alice still lived and practiced law. In the same year, she was able to attend a ceremony in Washington, DC, where she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. Nelle Harper continued to read with the help of a magnifying screen. Her other major amusement was traveling to Atmore, Alabama, to gam- ble. In August of 2010, Claudia Johnson and family and friends planned to go Monroeville so that Claudia and Nelle Harper could visit. She called Claudia before the visit to report that her memory was not sharp enough anymore for another formal interview but that she would welcome as many visits as could be managed. It became apparent to all at the time that Nelle Harper was correct in saying that she could no longer remem- ber things and several suspected that a certain amount of dementia had set in. The Last Six Years of Her Life The last six years in Nelle Harper’s life are worthy of a three-act drama themselves. In 2011 Alice Lee suffered a severe bout of pneumonia and