To Kill a Mockingbird

• The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee

This 2015 biography of Harper Lee is written by Marja Mills, who knew Lee personally. Based on interviews with Harper Lee and her sister Alice, the book offers an inside look at their upbringing and how To Kill a Mockingbird affected their lives.

• I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee

This biography by Charles J. Shields is geared toward younger readers. Shields is the author of the New York Times bestselling biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, which he then adapted into this version for a younger audience.

• Go Set a Watchman

Published in 2016, this novel is Harper Lee’s only other published work of fiction. Originally presented as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman is now regarded as an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. In it, a 26-year-old Scout returns home to Maycomb, Alabama from New York to visit Atticus.

• “Great Depression in Alabama"

This Encyclopedia of Alabama article explores the societal, industrial, and agricultural impacts of the Great Depression era in Alabama.

• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

A book by James Agee with photos by Walker Evans that documents the conditions among farmers in the South during the Great Depression. Published in 1941, the New York Public Library has since praised it as one of the most influential books of the 20th century. 

• To Kill a Mockingbird (1962 Film)

Directed by Robert Mulligan, the film stars Gregory Peck as Atticus, a performance for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor. The film received a number of other awards and nominations, including a nomination for Best Picture.

• Scottsboro: An American Tragedy

Directed by Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman, this 2001 documentary film relays the circumstances surrounding the Scottsboro Boys, a group of nine African American boys accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. This highly publicized trial may have contributed to Harper Lee’s depiction of Tom Robinson’s trial in her novel.

• To Kill a Mockingbird Setting: A Portrait of a Southern Town in the 1930s

This is a short video from American Masters that depicts what life was like in Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, during the Great Depression. It includes biographical details about Harper Lee’s upbringing and the town that inspired the novel’s setting of Maycomb.