Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in the small town of Monroeville, Alabama, as the youngest of Amaza Coleman Lee and Frances Finch Lee's four children. Harper Lee was enrolled in Huntington College from 1944-1945. Following that she went on to study law at the University of Alabama (1945-1949). In the 1950's Harper Lee moved to New York and worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Airlines and BOAC in New York City. While living in New York she gave up her position with the airline and moved to a cheap, worn-down apartment to focus more on her writing. During this time her father was struck with an illness that required her to make frequent trips to visit him in Monroeville. In 1957, Harper Lee submitted the manuscript of a novel consisting of a series of short stories to the J.B. Lippincott Company. The J.B. Lippincott Company refused the novel but urged her to re-write it. It took her two and a half years and the help of her editor, Tay Hohoff, to re-write the novel and finalize To Kill A Mockingbird. The novel was published in 1960, and remains Harper Lee's only published book. Harper Lee's outstanding novel To Kill A Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was transformed into an award winning motion picture in 1962.
The story is set in a small Alabama town, similar to the one Harper Lee was raised in, during the 1930s. A six-year-old girl named Jean Louise Finch, but better known as Scout, narrates the story. Having such a young narrator gives the story a certain innocence that wouldn't be present had an adult told it. In Part I Scout introduces the town of Maycomb; it's people and their ways. Accompanied by her older brother Jem and intriguing friend Dill, they satisfy the long, drawn out days of summer. In Part II Scout conveys the events relating to a court case where her father, Atticus Finch, is defending a black man who has been falsely charged with raping a white woman.