Harper Lee won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for To Kill a Mockingbird.
Published in 1960, the novel is narrated by Scout Finch, a child growing up in the fictional Alabama town of Maycomb. Its central courtroom story follows Scout's father, lawyer Atticus Finch, as he defends Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of assaulting a white woman.
The book drew on Lee's observations of small-town Alabama and on elements of her childhood. Truman Capote, Lee's longtime friend, is often associated with the character Dill Harris, although the precise relationship between fiction and biography is more complex than a simple one-to-one portrait.
Lee's Pulitzer was awarded in 1961, and the novel became one of the most widely read works in American literature. It is sometimes confused with Lee's second novel, Go Set a Watchman, which was published decades later and did not win the Pulitzer.