"When To Kill a Mockingbird was published in the summer of 1960, it seemed to have sprung from nowhere, like an Alabamian Athena: a perfectly formed novel from an unknown southern writer without any evident precedent or antecedent. The book somehow managed to be both urgently of its time and instantly timeless, addressing the era's most turbulent issues, from the civil rights movement to the sexual revolution,"
"But no writer is without influences and aspirations: Harper Lee had, of course, come from somewhere and worked tremendously hard to become someone. It was only because she did not like talking about herself that her origins seemed so mysterious, and inevitably, the better To Kill a Mockingbird did becoming a bestseller and then winning a Pulitzer prize, selling 1m copies and then 10m and then 40m the more theories and rumours rushed in to fill her silence."
When To Kill a Mockingbird appeared in summer 1960 it arrived as a seemingly miraculous, perfectly formed southern novel that captured urgent contemporary issues while resonating with timeless moral themes. The novel addressed civil rights, sexual liberalization, moral awakening, familial love, and conflicts between individual conscience and social pressures. Harper Lee emerged from relative obscurity but also from a background of influences, hard work, and deliberate privacy that fed public speculation. Newly published early short stories, drafted before the novel during Lee’s early New York years, feature familiar characters and settings and reveal the contradictions and conflicts she continued to explore.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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