To Kill a Mockingbird

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) has garnered both staggering critical acclaim and fiery controversy. An immediate international success, the best seller (over 30 million copies worldwide) has been translated into 40 languages and has never been out of print. It was made into an Academy Award–winning film in 1962. The literary classic continues to spark debate and reflections about race in the United States.

The only published novel by author Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird incited a torrent of literary excitement. This eager public reception secured its place in the annals of classic American literature. Many Americans cited To Kill a Mockingbird as their most influential book, second only to the Bible. Written at the height of civil rights and integration struggles in the United States, the novel was instrumental in opening a public dialogue about race relations in the 1930s American south, even if it constructed the racial conversation as a primarily black and white dichotomy. In doing so, it forestalled a more multicultural conception of America.

Transcript

• The theater of the Directors Guild of America is a scene of a long-awaited preview. It is the first showing – a private one – of To Kill a Mocking Bird, a story already recognized as an American folk classic. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book was written by Harper Lee, left, who attends with director Robert Mulligan, Mrs. Mulligan, and producer Alan J. Pakula. Ms. Lee’s book sold six million copies. Vince Edwards (without scalpel but with Sherry Nelson) is here, and Natalie Wood arrives with Warren Beatty. In private showings, To Kill a Mocking Bird has been widely acclaimed, and the leading role has been called his greatest by star Gregory Peck, here with his wife.

The intensely private author was born as Nelle Harper Lee in Monroeville, Alabama, on April 28, 1926, a descendant of Civil War Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee. She studied law at the University of Alabama and as an exchange student at Oxford before she began her writing career in New York with aspirations to become “the Jane Austen of south Alabama.” Although the plot of Lee's magnum opus resembles Lee's own childhood as a self-proclaimed tomboy who grew up as a close friend of writer Truman Capote, the author, in her three interviews since the novel's publication, has denied any direct autobiographical connection to her young protagonist, Jean Louise “Scout” Finch.