The novel is set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, (loosely based on Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Monroe County) between the summer of 1932 and Halloween night of 1935, during the Great Depression when many blacks and whites shared a common poverty. Lee did so, and the result, To Kill A Mockingbird, was published in 1960 to critical acclaim and public enthusiasm, winning the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her editor at Lippincott Publishers, Tay Hohoff, convinced her to pull out the flashbacks of Scout’s youth and refocus the novel around them. She originally conceived it as a novel focusing on main character Jean Louise “Scout” Finch as an adult returning to Maycomb for a summer visit and confronting the racial realities of her hometown in response to the civil rights movement it was to be titled Go Set a Watchman. Lee began work on what would become the novel in 1956 while living in New York City. The story told in the novel parallels two court cases that took place in Alabama but was not based directly on them: The Scottsboro Trials of 1931, in which nine black youths were tried for allegedly raping two white women on a train in north Alabama and a November 1933 incident in Monroeville in which Naomi Lowery, a poor white woman, alleged that Walter Lett, a black ex-convict, sexually assaulted her. The themes and issues raised in the novel remain relevant, and thus To Kill A Mockingbird will likely hold its place in public discourse on tolerance, justice, and humanity. It continues to sell around a million copies a year and is often ranked among the world’s best-sellers. The Pulitzer Prize–winning novel spent 88 weeks on bestseller lists, and by the 50th anniversary of its publication in 2010 had sold some 40 million copies. By almost any measurement, Harper Lee‘s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) is the most important novel ever authored by a native Alabamian.
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