To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee published her only novel in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Set in fictional Maycomb, Alabama, during the 1930s Depression, it tells the story of lawyer Atticus Finch defending a Black man falsely accused of rape through the eyes of his young daughter Scout. Over 45 million copies have been sold worldwide. It topped a 2018 survey of the 100 books that changed readers' lives and remains the most frequently challenged book in American school libraries, a testament to the power it still carries to disturb, provoke, and transform.