Harper Lee

Harper Lee was an American novelist, born on 28 April 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, and she died on 19 February 2016. She grew up in a small Southern town, where her father worked as a lawyer, and she drew on that world for her writing. As a child she was friends with the future writer Truman Capote, who lived nearby for a time.

Her first published novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, appeared in 1960 and became one of the most widely read American books of the twentieth century. It won the Pulitzer Prize and is taught in schools across the English-speaking world. Lee was private and gave few interviews, and for decades she published almost nothing more. A second novel, Go Set a Watchman, appeared in 2015, late in her life. Her work matters for its clear, humane look at justice, prejudice and growing up in the American South.