Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee (1926–2016) was born in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of four children; like Scout in her novel, she was the daughter of a respected small-town Alabama attorney. Her childhood friend Truman Capote, who spent summers in Monroeville, was the model for Dill Harris in To Kill a Mockingbird, and she later helped Capote research In Cold Blood (1966).

To Kill a Mockingbird was published by Lippincott in 1960 after a long revision process with the editor Tay Hohoff, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. Narrated by Scout Finch, whose father Atticus is a lawyer in the Alabama town of Maycomb, it looks at racism and class in the Deep South of the 1930s through the eyes of two children, and it draws loosely on Lee's family, her neighbors and an event near Monroeville in 1936. Gregory Peck won an Oscar for playing Atticus in the 1962 film. Lee published only a handful of magazine essays afterward, among them “Love—in Other Words” for Vogue in 1961, and set aside a book about an Alabama murder case, working title The Reverend. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. Go Set a Watchman appeared in 2015, and The Land of Sweet Forever, a collection of her stories and essays, in October 2025.

Read To Kill a Mockingbird first, and read it on its own before going near Go Set a Watchman. Mockingbird is the novel Lee and her editor shaped for publication. Watchman is the manuscript she submitted earlier, now generally accepted as a first draft of the same book, with many passages later reused. Starting with Watchman means meeting a version of Atticus who attends a segregationist Citizens' Council meeting before you have met the Atticus most readers know.

Go Set a Watchman is best read second, as a look at how the book changed. In it, Jean Louise (Scout) Finch, now 26, comes home from New York to Maycomb for her annual visit and discovers how deep the bigotry runs in her town and her family. After that, The Land of Sweet Forever (2025) gathers the shorter pieces she published.