TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

The Birth of a Masterpiece

Nelle Harper Lee was born April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, a city of about 7,000 in southwest Alabama. She was the youngest of four children, a tomboy and an avid reader.

Harper Lee attended Huntingdon College and the University of Alabama, writing for the campus literary magazines: Huntress at Huntingdon and Rammer Jammer, a humor magazine at the University of Alabama. At both schools, she wrote short stories and pieces about racial injustice.

She moved to New York City, where she worked as a reservation clerk for Eastern Airlines in New York City until the late 1950s, when she resolved to devote herself to writing. Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. The following month, she received a gift from friends of a year's wages with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas."

Lee worked on her first book for two and a half years, initially titling it Atticus. She later changed the title to reflect a story that went beyond a simple character portrait. She completed To Kill a Mockingbird in the summer of 1959. Although she disavowed any autobiographical references in the story, Monroeville was a small town much like Maycomb.  Lee’s father was a lawyer who unsuccessfully defended two black men accused of murder in 1919. She had a brother four years her senior (as Jem was to Scout) and a housekeeper much like Calpurnia who came once a day to tend to the house and family.  Down the street from the Lee house was a boarded-up house, much like the Radley house. The son of the family living there got into some legal trouble and the father kept him at home for 24 years for the shame he brought them. Harper Lee also had a childhood friend who visited in the summers when he would stay with his aunt next door to the Lee house. This friend was then known as Truman Persons but would later become famous as Truman Capote.  Unlike Scout’s mother, Harper Lee’s mother lived until 1951.

During Harper Lee’s childhood, a sensational trial took place that may have influenced her creation of To Kill a Mockingbird.  In 1931, when Lee was five, nine young black men were accused of raping two white women near Scottsboro, Alabama. After a series of lengthy, highly publicized, and often bitter trials, five of the nine men were sentenced to long prison terms. Many prominent lawyers and other American citizens saw the sentences as spurious and motivated only by racial prejudice. It was also suspected that the women who had accused the men were lying, and in appeal after appeal, their claims became more dubious. Despite medical testimony that the women had not been raped, the all-white jury found the men guilty of the crime and sentenced all but the youngest, a twelve-year-old boy, to death. Six years of subsequent trials saw most of these convictions repealed and all but one of the men freed or paroled.

To Kill a Mockingbird was first published in 1960 and received a mixed reaction from the critics.  Some characterized it as a children’s book, others felt it was overly moralistic.  The public, however, was enthusiastic about the story, perhaps because it struck a chord in the racially-charged atmosphere of the 1960s.  The novel became widely available through its inclusion in the Book of the Month Club, Reader's Digest, and Condensed Books. The book earned the Pulitzer Prize for 1961 and the Brotherhood Award of National Conference of Christians and Jews in the same year. Harper Lee became very famous and quite wealthy in a very short period of time. She published a few magazine articles after the success of her first novel,* and she later assisted her friend, Truman Capote, in research for his magnum opus, In Cold Blood. To Kill a Mockingbird remains her sole published novel.

One year after initial publication, To Kill a Mockingbird had been translated into 10 languages. By 1982, over 15 million copies of the book had been sold; ten years later, the sales figures had climbed to 18 million copies of the paperback version alone. The book has never been out of print in hardcover or paperback. It has sold over 30 million copies and been translated into over 40 languages since first being published. A 1991 survey by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress' Center for the Book found that To Kill a Mockingbird was rated behind only the Bible in books that are "most often cited as making a difference." In 1999, it was voted the "Best Novel of the 20th Century" by readers of the Library Journal. It is listed as #5 on the Modern Library's Reader's List of the 100 Best Novels in the English language since 1900, and #4 on the rival Radcliffe Publishing Course's 100 Best Board Picks for Novels and Nonfiction. To Kill a Mockingbird appeared at the top of a list developed by librarians in 2006 who answered the question, "Which book should every adult read before they die?" followed by the Bible and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

*"Love--In Other Words" in Vogue, 1961; "Christmas to Me" in McCall's, 1961; and "When Children Discover America" in McCall's, 1965.