The Big Idea Behind TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Harper Lee is the youngest of four children by Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Finch Lee. Lee's education consisted of two years at Huntingdon College, four years at the University of Alabama where she studied law, and one year at Oxford University. In the fifties she worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines in New York City but soon gave it up to concentrate on her writing. In 1957 Lee submitted the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird to the J. B. Lippincott Company but was told that her book more closely resembled a set of short stories strung together than a novel. The publisher urged her to re-write it and over the next two and a half years Lee re-worked the manuscript with Tay Hohoff, her editor. Finally, in 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird, was published to unanimous critical acclaim in 1960, culminating in a Pulitzer Prize in 1961. It would be Harper Lee's first and only novel.

Over the years, Harper Lee has received many offers to turn her celebrated novel into stage musicals, TV or stage plays, and film remakes, but she has always refused, simply because no one else could embody Atticus Finch as well as Gregory Peck. She once said in an interview, "That film was a work of art and there isn't anyone else who could play the part." It was said that the part of Atticus Finch was based on Harper Lee's own father, Amasa Lee. Harper Lee later told Gregory Peck that he was her Atticus the moment her novel was bought for the big screen.

by Scott McGee