To Thrill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee, in 2007                                         Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

I don't know anyone who doesn't think To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the best novels ever written. Fortunately for us all, the movie made from the book, which starred the great Gregory Peck, was also superlative (and we all know how infrequently that happens!). Harper Lee, who wrote the above-mentioned narrative, never ~ to anyone's knowledge ~ wrote another book and remains a rather reserved figure. It wasn't until this year, on her 88th birthday, that Lee agreed to allow Mockingbird to be released as an e-book (http://somanyinterestingthings.blogspot.com/2014/04/just-because-to-kill-mockingbird.html). from our bibliophilistic friends at wisegeek.com:

American author Harper Lee makes an estimated $3.3 million US Dollars (USD) in royalties each year for her 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which is the only novel she ever published. This is equivalent to around $9,000 USD each day. To Kill a Mockingbird tells the story of a white Alabama lawyer defending a black man falsely accused of rape during the Great Depression through the point of view of the lawyer’s young daughter. The novel sells between 750,000 to one million copies every year, to high schools in
particular, and was also made into a 1962 movie that won three Academy Awards.

More about Harper Lee:

• Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird after receiving a Christmas gift from her friends of enough money to take a year off from working just to write.


• The last official interview Lee gave to the media was in 1964, as of 2014.


• Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961, served on the National Council of the Arts in 1966 at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 by President George Bush.