Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926 to Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Harper Lee grew up in the small southwestern town of Monroeville in Alabama. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who also served on the state legislature (1926-38). As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and she enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote, who provided the basis of the character of Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lee was only five years old in when, in April 1931 in the small town of Scottsboro in Alabama, the first trials began with regard to the purported rapes of two white women by...
