Lindsey Graham

They framed their revised draft through Jean Louise's eyes and set it in the Great Depression, when she was still a child who went by the nickname Scout.

To populate Scout's hometown, Lee pulled from characters she herself had known during her childhood.

There was the mysterious neighbor down the street, Boo Radley, whom the kids tried to coax out of his home.

A loving black housekeeper, Calpurnia, who cared for Scout and her brother.

a rambunctious best friend named Dill who spent his summers in the house next door.

And at the heart of the story was a trial, which Lee said was a composite of all the trials in the world, but set at Monroeville's courthouse.

In the story, Scout's father, Atticus Finch, defends a black man named Tom Robinson who'd been falsely accused of raping a white woman.

Despite the prejudice of many of his white neighbors, Atticus told his children, the one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

And when the jury chose to convict Robinson of the crime, the children learn a stark lesson about racial injustice.

In their father's words, in our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins.

As the manuscript continued to evolve, Lee retitled it Atticus, but by its third draft, she was calling it To Kill a Mockingbird.

By the spring of 1959, Ho-Hoff thought Mockingbird was ready to be published.

As Lee waited to receive galleys of the book, she got a call from her friend Truman Capote.

Capote's editor at the New Yorker had given him a new assignment, to go to Kansas and write about a wheat farmer, his wife, and two kids who had all been brutally murdered.

Capote told Lee he needed a research assistant, and Lee enthusiastically signed up.

Capote said the trip would take just a few days, but their visit to this small town in Kansas to investigate a murder would change both of the writers' lives and their relationship forever.

Imagine it's late December of 1959.

You're at home in your small farming community of Holcomb, Kansas.

And tonight, you and your husband are hosting two new guests who recently arrived in town, all the way from New York City.

Right away, they struck you as an odd pair.