harper lee

When I was growing up, interesting young female protagonists were thin on the ground, especially ones who looked and thought and sounded like me. Enter Scout Finch, disheveled, scrappy and precocious, she leapt off the page and into my heart, compliments of Nelle Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. Instantly successful, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and would go on to become the classic of American Literature, selling thirty million copies. So far. A staple of high school English classes, despite its dark adult themes of domestic violence, racism, and rape, To Kill a Mockingbird continues to sell about a million copies per year. Lee grew up in a small, southern town, the child of an attorney father and a distant mother who struggled with mental illness. Lee’s r...