To Kill a Mockingbird
(Harper Lee)

Harper Lee penned “To Kill a Mockingbird” loosely based on her experiences growing up in Alabama when racism was prevalent. She grew up in a small town called Monroeville, which is very similar to the novel’s Maycomb.

Some characters and occurrences in the novel are taken from her own family, friends, and experiences. Lee’s father was a lawyer, like Atticus Finch. In the novel, one of her close friends is Dill, an overly imaginative and supremely innocent young boy, modeled after real-life childhood friend, and fellow author, Truman Capote.

The false rape story came from a case that Lee was familiar with from when she was a young girl, involving nine black men who were accused of raping two white women. Many people believed this accusation to be a fallacy.

Harper Lee finally published “To Kill a Mockingbird” in the 1960’s, in the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. Reviews of the novel were mixed, with many people finding its racial morality refreshing and necessary, and others finding the story overly moral and hard to take seriously with the narrator being a little girl.

Lee requested, in the mid-1990’s, that no one add any preambles or criticisms to future copies of the novel because it tells its own story and is not in need of any new additions. While the subject matter is very serious at times (such as racism, prejudice, rape, physical and emotion abuse), it remains a tale of hope, innocence, imagination, and happiness in the face of good versus evil.