Lindsey Graham

Lee had only two weeks to prepare his defense, and one of the victim's sons was allowed to serve on the jury.

The accused men were sentenced to death, and Lee never argued another criminal case.

But A.C.

Lee did encourage his daughter Nell to pursue a career in law and follow in his footsteps as her older sister Alice had.

And for a while, it seemed Nell might.

After a year at a woman's college in 1945, Nell transferred to the University of Alabama's law program.

There she stood out from her sorority sisters as a short-haired, cigarette-smoking introvert who'd rather play golf by herself than socialize.

She wrote for both the student newspaper and humor magazine, and by the time she was a senior, Lee had begun to think it was writing that she'd like to pursue and not the law.

Then, just one semester short of her degree, Lee dropped out of college, much to her father's dismay.

She saved up some money by waitressing at the Monroeville Golf Club, then packed up her bags and moved north to try and make it as a writer, just like her childhood friend, Truman Capote.

Truman had skipped college and jump-started his career writing for the New Yorker magazine.

By the summer of 1949, his first novel had already shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Basking in his success, he decided to spend that summer in Morocco, so he wasn't in New York in August of 1949 to welcome Lee when she arrived.

So if Lee had dreamed of a seamless Monroeville to Manhattan story like Capote's, she was in for a rude awakening.

She couldn't get work as a full-time writer, so she took a job in a bookstore, then another as an airline reservation agent.

It was barely enough to get by, and she soon found herself scavenging for loose change, checking parking meters for discarded coins.

She lived off peanut butter sandwiches in a third-floor walk-up apartment without a stove or hot water.

Lee spent much of her precious free time trying to write at a makeshift desk, which she constructed herself from an old door and some crates.

But she didn't make much progress.

She would later recall, contrary to what most people think, there's no glamour to writing.