Lindsey Graham

Lee was already in his fifties by the time Nell entered the first grade.

A lawyer and part-owner of a local newspaper, he was often stoic and introspective in public.

But at home, Nell and her siblings found him to be a loving father who encouraged their curiosity.

And it was A.C.

who gave Nell her first typewriter.

Nell shared her prized typewriter with her next-door neighbor, a boy named Truman Streckfus Persons, who would later go by the name Truman Capote.

Capote's mother moved him to Monroeville in the summer of 1930 to live with relatives when he was six years old and Lee was five.

Even after his mother returned to take him to New York a few years later, he'd spend every summer back in Alabama.

So Lee and Capote became close friends, and could often be found playing jacks or reading Sherlock Holmes books in the treehouse between their families' homes.

They also spent many an afternoon huddled around Lee's typewriter, writing stories with a Webster's dictionary in hand.

And they would often hang around the local courthouse, too, where they'd sit in the second-floor gallery and watch Lee's father, A.C., argue cases below.

A.C.

's Southern heritage shaped his views.

His father had been a Confederate soldier and was distantly related to General Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army.

A.C.

opposed federal anti-lynching laws and condoned segregation until later in life.

But A.C.

Lee was vehemently opposed to the way justice was often carried out in places like Monroeville, at the hands of vigilante mobs or terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

As a lawyer, A.C.

Lee believed in the power of the law to bring justice.