ABOUT THE AUTHOR
To Kill a Mockingbird is an autobiographical novel that depicts fiction but was written to recapture the
growth and development of a period in the life of the author.
Born in Monroeville, Alabama, on April 28, 1926, Nelle Harper Lee was the third and youngest child of
Amasa Coleman Lee and the former Frances Finch. From her mother’s surname she borrowed the
family name of the main characters in To Kill a Mockingbird; her father, a lawyer, served as a pattern
for Atticus Finch, the attorney whose quiet heroism and integrity are central to the novel. Atticus
Finch’s character may have been modeled in part on a real-life hero who was noted for his integrity—
the Civil War general Robert E. Lee, who was an ancestor of the author.
Maycomb, the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird, is modeled on Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville.
Though the seat of Monroe County in southern Alabama, Monroeville is a small rural town. It was
smaller still when Harper Lee was a girl. Lee grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s at a
time when life forced many challenges to all regardless of social class distinction—much like Scout
Finch, the narrator of the novel. “We had to use our own devices in our play,” Lee once told an
interviewer. “Nobody had any money. We didn’t have toys…so the result was that we lived in our
imagination most of the time. We devised things; we were readers, and we would transfer everything
we had seen on the printed page to the backyard in the form of high drama.” This imagination allowed
Lee to cultivate a talent for creating fiction and to eventually become a celebrated author.
By the time Harper Lee was old enough to read a newspaper, the notorious Scottsboro Trials had
been in the news for several years. The Alabama trial, which made national headlines, served as an
ugly reminder of racial bigotry in the 1930s.
In March 1931, nine African American youths were arrested and charged with raping two white
women. Over the next five years, a series of trials was held. The first trial began just twelve days after
the arrest and lasted only three days. In spite of evidence of the men's innocence, eight of the nine
men were found guilty and sentenced to death. The extreme sentences and hasty trial left many
observers outraged. The case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, and several sets of
new trials were held. By 1937 four of the defendants were freed, while the others were sentenced to
long prison terms.
The Scottsboro Trials share several similarities with the fictional trial of Tom Robinson in To Kill a
Mockingbird. Like the Scottsboro defendants, Tom is charged with raping a white woman. There is
also a parallel between Atticus Finch and Judge James E. Norton. Both acted in the interest of justice
when an African American was wrongfully accused. In a 1933 trial of one of the Scottsboro
defendants, Judge Norton set aside the jury's guilty verdict because he believed the jurors had
ignored the evidence. Both the fictional and real trials had all-white juries. In the South of the 1930s,
African American citizens were commonly excluded from serving on juries.
Although she loved writing, the young Harper Lee was also interested in law, her father’s profession.
After graduating from local public schools, she attended Huntington College and the University of
Alabama, where she studied law before embarking on a year-long stay in England as an exchange
student at Oxford University. Lee never earned her law degree, but she feels that studying law gave
her a logic and a lucidity helpful in her writing.
Still seeking to broaden her horizons, Lee settled in New York City, where she worked as an airline
reservations clerk for several years. One day she showed some tales of her childhood to a literary
agent, who urged her to rework them as a novel. The result was To Kill a Mockingbird, a highly
acclaimed best seller that won her the Pulitzer prize for fiction and a lasting place in the annals of
contemporary American literature.