[2][3][4] The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbours in Monroeville, Alabama, as well as a childhood event that occurred near her hometown in 1936.

[16] Although Nelle remained in contact with her significantly older sisters throughout their lives, only her brother was close enough in age to play with, though she bonded with Truman Capote (1924–1984), who visited family in Monroeville during the summers from 1928 until 1934.

[17] While enrolled at Monroe County High School, Lee developed an interest in English literature, in part through her teacher Gladys Watson, who became her mentor.

Nelle also wrote for the university newspaper (The Crimson White) and a humor magazine (Rammer Jammer), but to her father's great disappointment, she left one semester short of completing the credit hours for a degree.

I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.In 1949, Lee moved to New York City and took jobs—first at a bookstore, then as an airline reservation agent—while writing in her spare time.

[25] During the next couple of years, she led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled To Kill a Mockingbird.

)[25] Hohoff described the give and take between author and editor: "When she disagreed with a suggestion, we talked it out, sometimes for hours" ... "And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of country.

[26] Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate bestseller and won great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.

As the To Kill a Mockingbird manuscript went into publication production in 1959, Lee accompanied Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to help him research what they thought would be an article on a small town's response to the murder of a farmer and his family.

[32] After To Kill a Mockingbird was released, Lee began a whirlwind of publicity tours, which she found difficult given her penchant for privacy and many interviewers' characterization of the work as a "coming-of-age story".

[38] Lee assumed significant care responsibilities for her aging father, who was thrilled with her success, and who even began signing autographs as "Atticus Finch".

Lee preferred to visit friends at their homes (though she came to distance herself from those who criticized her drinking),[33][page needed] and also made unannounced appearances at libraries or other gatherings, particularly in Monroeville.

In 1966, Lee wrote a letter to the editor in response to the attempts of a Richmond, Virginia, area school board to ban To Kill a Mockingbird as "immoral literature":[14] Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners.

To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.James J. Kilpatrick, editor of The Richmond News Leader, started the Beadle Bumble fund to pay fines for victims of what he termed "despots on the bench".

After the board in Richmond ordered schools to dispose of all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird, Kilpatrick wrote, "A more moral novel scarcely could be imagined."

[43] In March 2005, Lee arrived in Philadelphia—her first trip to the city since signing with publisher Lippincott in 1960—to receive the inaugural ATTY Award for positive depictions of attorneys in the arts from the Spector Gadon & Rosen Foundation.

"[48] While attending an August 20, 2007, ceremony inducting four members into the Alabama Academy of Honor, Lee declined an invitation to address the audience, saying: "Well, it's better to be silent than to be a fool.

Dr. Thomas Lane Butts said Lee was living in an assisted-living facility, was using a wheelchair, partially blind and deaf, and suffering from memory loss.

Butts also shared that Lee told him why she never wrote again: "Two reasons: one, I wouldn't go through the pressure and publicity I went through with To Kill a Mockingbird for any amount of money.

"[54] On May 3, 2013, Lee filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court to regain the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird, seeking unspecified damages from a son-in-law of her former literary agent and related entities.

Lee claimed that the man "engaged in a scheme to dupe" her into assigning him the copyright on the book in 2007 when her hearing and eyesight were in decline, and she was residing in an assisted-living facility after suffering a stroke.

This prompted Lee's attorney to file a lawsuit on October 15 that same year, "which takes issue the museum's website and gift shop, which it accuses of 'palming off its goods', including T-shirts, coffee mugs other various trinkets with Mockingbird brands.

[2] The book is set some 20 years after the time period depicted in Mockingbird, when Scout returns as an adult from New York to visit her father in Maycomb, Alabama.

While not fully praising the book, Kakutani found the publication of Watchman an important stepping stone in understanding Lee's work.

In February 2015, the State of Alabama, through its Human Resources Department, launched an investigation into whether Lee was competent enough to consent to the publishing of Go Set a Watchman.

She described Lee as "in a wheelchair in an assisted living center, nearly deaf and blind, with a uniformed guard posted at the door" and her visitors "restricted to those on an approved list.

They said she knew full well that it was the same one submitted to Tay Hohoff in the 1950s that was reworked into Mockingbird, and that Carter had been sitting on the discovery, waiting for the moment when she, and not Alice, would be in charge of Harper Lee's affairs.

In a study conducted by three Polish academics, Michał Choiński, Maciej Edera and Jan Rybicki, the authorial fingerprints of Lee, Hohoff and Capote were contrasted to prove that To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman were both written by the same person.