LEE, Harper (1926-2016). To Kill A Mockingbird. Philadelphia & New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, [1960].
8vo. Original green cloth–backed boards; original dust jacket designed by Shirley Smith (some light edgewear; full morocco folding box.
FIRST EDITION of Lee’s first book and winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize. In the FIRST ISSUE dust jacket with the photo of Lee credited to Truman Capote on rear panel. The rear flap includes reviews by Jonathan Daniels which is most often seen.
[With:] a 1pp. ALS from Harper Lee to the Smileys, dated 1 January 1997, thanking them for her first copy of FIRSTS which she writes that she is subscribing to immediately. “I’m not a collector (of anything) but I have, as you may guess, great interest in books. FIRSTS is absolutely first-rate!”.
Included is the uncashed check for her subscription, signed with her full name “Nelle Harper Lee”.
“Harper Lee’s only novel touched a nerve in American society when it was first published… The author claimed that her story of racial bias in the sleepy fictional Alabama town of Maycomb was pure imagination, but reporters who visited her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, on the 30th anniversary of the book’s publication found remarkable similarities to the novel in both setting and character. In essence, the racial ills chronicled in the novel appear to have been realistically drawn from the author’s life” (100 Banned Books, pp. 404–405).
The novel still draws controversy today with it being challenged by many high schools and parents throughout the United States who object to either the language being used or the way in which race is represented. The Committee on Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association lists the novel as being among the 10 most frequently challenged books today. To Kill A Mockingbird was adapted into film in 1962 which Smiley claims is “flawless as the novel…Horton Foote’s scenario is a textbook example of the process of retaining a novel’s most important elements while condensing them into a two-hour screenplay format. Foote’s talents are unique; he is of the South, and his own original work is in harmony with the tone of Lee’s novel” (Smiley, Books into Film pp. 180-183).