Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist whose 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of modern American literature. Its plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbors in Monroeville, Alabama, and on a childhood event near her hometown in 1936, and the novel addresses racist attitudes and the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s as seen through the eyes of two children. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in researching his book In Cold Blood (1966), and received numerous honors including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 for her contribution to literature.