Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee (1926–2016) was an American author famed for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), a story on racial injustice in the Depression-era South, inspired by her childhood in Monroeville, Alabama, and her lawyer father, believed to be the model for Atticus Finch. A lifelong friend of Truman Capote, Lee moved to New York to write, became a literary sensation, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and published a second novel, Go Set a Watchman, in 2015, which was an early draft of her masterpiece, before her death in 2016.