When a school board tried to ban “To Kill a Mockingbird” as immoral, author Harper Lee wrote a letter asking if the board members were literate and donated money to enroll them in the first grade.
The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are loosely based on Lee’s observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936 when she was 10. The novel deals with the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as depicted through the eyes of two children. It was inspired by racist attitudes in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.