About the Book

From the Book Jacket

The setting is a dusty Southern town during the Depression. A white woman accuses a black man of rape. Though he is obviously innocent, the outcome of his trial is such a foregone conclusion that no lawyer will step forward to defend him - except the town's most distinguished citizen. His compassionate defense cost him many friendships but earns him the respect and admiration of his two motherless children.

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it. To Kill a Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award - winning film, also a classic.

Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill a Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos.

Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American Literature.

The Birth of a Novel

She grew up next door to Truman Capote's aunt and uncle. Lee and Capote spent summers in Monroeville and became great friends. Later, Lee said that Capote was the inspiration for Dill; moreover, Capote used her also in his fiction, first as Idabel Tompkins in Other Voices, Other Rooms and as Ann (Jumbo) Finchburg in "The Thanksgiving Visitor". Lee's father gave the children a heavy old Underwood typewriter which they shifted between the two houses to collaborate on stories about their neighbors, much like Scout, Dill and Jem create stories about their neighbors in the first part of  To Kill a Mockingbird.

In 1957 she offered her novel Go Set a Watchman to agents Maurice Craine and Annie Laurie Williams. The title was changed to Atticus and then To Kill a Mockingbird and submitted to J.B. Lippincott. She was told that her novel consisted of a series of short stories strung together, and she was urged to re-write it. For two years, she reworked the manuscript with the help of her editor, Tay Hohoff until it was finally accepted for publication.

Inspired by Real Life Events:

When Lee was five years old (in 1931), the trial of the "Scottsboro boys" began in Alabama. Two white women accused nine black men of raping them. The men were almost lynched before the trial. Medical evidence presented during the trial proved that the women were not raped but the men were convicted. All but the youngest were sentenced to death. Evidence indicated that one of the women was a prostitute. This trial became the inspiration for the second part of Lee's novel. Unlike Tom Robinson, the Scottsboro boys' case bounced around the court system until 1937 when all the cases were dropped. By the 1950's, all the "boys" were out of prison, but all had lost 20 years of their lives to prejudice and the slow moving United States judicial system.

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