Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. One of America's most celebrated and influential writers, she is the author of the acclaimed novels To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman as well as the story and essay collection The Land of Sweet Forever, published posthumously in 2025. Lee was awarded numerous literary awards and honors including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died in 2016 at the age of eighty-nine.
A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere eighteen ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird * The Washington Post, 1961 * There is humour as well as tragedy in this book, besides its faint note of hope for human nature; and it is delightfully written * Sunday Times * Someone rare has written this very fine novel, a writer with the liveliest sense of life and the warmest, most authentic humour. A touching book; and so funny, so likeable * Truman Capote * No one ever forgets this book * Independent * Harper Lee announced she would be releasing a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird this summer - 55 years after her debut. Go Set a Watchman, completed in the mid-50s but lost for more than half a century, was written before To Kill A Mockingbird and features Scout as an adult * Guardian *