📍South Alabama Avenue, Monroeville, AL 36460, USA
1926 – 1944“I grew up in Monroeville, a small courthouse town in southern Alabama, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee, a lawyer, newspaper editor and state legislator, and Frances Finch Lee. Our house was on South Alabama Avenue, a few blocks from the town square and its domed courthouse, and next door, in his aunts' house, lived a small, clever, unusual boy called Truman Persons, later Truman Capote. We met when we were five and became inseparable. I was a tomboy who climbed trees, fought boys and read everything. Truman and I built a treehouse, and made up stories together. My father gave us an old Underwood typewriter, and we took turns dictating and typing our tales. On days when other children went to the pictures, we sat in the balcony of the courthouse watching my father and other lawyers argue cases. My father was a principled, quiet man, and his sense of fairness left a mark on me for life. I went to school a few blocks from home, then to college and law school, and in 1949 moved to New York to write. In 1960 I published To Kill a Mockingbird, set in a town called Maycomb that is very like Monroeville in the 1930s, with a girl called Scout, her brother Jem, their friend Dill, who owes a great deal to Truman, and their father, Atticus Finch. Our house is gone now, but the Old Courthouse is a museum, and Monroeville stages a play of my novel every spring, with the trial scene performed in the very courtroom I knew as a child.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today