In July 1960 a previously unknown southern writer named Harper Lee (1926- ) published a first novel that briefly made her a household name. To Kill a Mockingbird was an instant success, selling half a million copies in one year and winning the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The response was understandable, since Lee had a terrific story and told it well. Set in a rural Alabama town in the 1930s, To Kill a Mockingbird is the story of six-year-old Jean Louise ("Scout") as she experiences two sets of events: her widowed father's defense of a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and her realization that the reclusive "Boo" Radley is neither strange nor evil, as the townspeople think. In both cases Lee demonstrates the follies of prejudice. Such a theme was particularly relevant in the early 1960s, when Americans were still...