Middle years
For 40 years, Lee lived part-time at 433 East 82nd Street in Manhattan, near her childhood friend Capote. His first novel, the semi-autobiographical Other Voices, Other Rooms, had been published in 1948; a decade later Capote published Breakfast at Tiffany's, which became a film, a musical, and two stage plays. As the To Kill a Mockingbird manuscript went into publication production in 1959, Lee accompanied Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to help him research what they thought would be an article on a small town's response to the murder of a farmer and his family. Capote would expand the material into his best-selling book, In Cold Blood, serialized beginning in September 1965 and published in 1966. Her friendship with Capote, however, would suffer and peter out eventually in the wake of the worldwide success of Lee's novel, which Capote had troubles coming to terms with.
After To Kill a Mockingbird was released, Lee began a whirlwind of publicity tours, which she found difficult given her penchant for privacy and many interviewers' characterization of the work as a "coming-of-age story". Racial tensions in the South had increased prior to the book's release. Students at North Carolina A&T University staged the first sit-in months before publication. As the book became a best seller, Freedom Riders arrived in Alabama and were beaten in Anniston and Birmingham. Meanwhile, To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1961 Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews and became a Reader's Digest Book Club condensed selection and an alternate Book of the Month Club selection.
Lee helped with the adaptation of the book to the 1962 Academy Award–winning screenplay by Horton Foote, and said: "I think it is one of the best translations of a book to film ever made." Gregory Peck won an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, the father of the novel's narrator, Scout. The families became close; Peck's grandson, Harper Peck Voll, is named after her.
From the time of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird until her death in 2016, Lee granted almost no requests for interviews or public appearances and, with the exception of a few short essays, published nothing further until 2015. She worked on a follow-up novel—The Long Goodbye—but eventually filed it away unfinished.
Lee assumed significant care responsibilities for her aging father, who was thrilled with her success, and who even began signing autographs as "Atticus Finch". His health worsened and he died in Alabama on April 15, 1962. Lee decided to spend more time in New York City as she mourned. Over the decades, her friend Capote had adopted a decadent lifestyle, which contrasted with Lee's preference for a quiet, more anonymous existence. Lee preferred to visit friends at their homes (though she came to distance herself from those who criticized her drinking), and also made unannounced appearances at libraries or other gatherings, particularly in Monroeville.
In January 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Lee to the National Council on the Arts.
Lee also realized that her book had become controversial, particularly with segregationists and other opponents of the civil rights movement. In 1966, Lee wrote a letter to the editor in response to the attempts of a Richmond, Virginia, area school board to ban To Kill a Mockingbird as "immoral literature":
Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.
James J. Kilpatrick, editor of The Richmond News Leader, started the Beadle Bumble fund to pay fines for victims of what he termed "despots on the bench". He built the fund using contributions from readers and later used it to defend books as well as people. After the board in Richmond ordered schools to dispose of all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird, Kilpatrick wrote, "A more moral novel scarcely could be imagined." In the name of the Beadle Bumble fund, he then offered free copies to children who wrote in, and by the end of the first week, he had given away 81 copies.
Beginning in 1978, with her sisters' encouragement, Lee returned to Alabama and began a book about an Alabama serial murderer and the trial of his killer in Alexander City, under the working title The Reverend, but also put it aside when she was not satisfied.
When Lee attended the 1983 Alabama History and Heritage Festival in Eufaula, Alabama, as her sister had arranged, she presented the essay "Romance and High Adventure".
