Harper Lee

(1926 - 2016)

Having grown up in Alabama with Truman Capote a next-door neighbor in the late 1920s, Harper Lee moved to New York City in 1949. After she completed To Kill a Mockingbird in 1959, Capote wrote to producer David O. Selznick, “It’s going to be a great success. In it, I am the character called ‘Dill.’ ” She received a Pulitzer Prize for it. The film adaptation starred Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, and in 1997 the actor remarked, “Hardly a day passes that I don’t think how lucky I was to be cast in that film.”