Person of the Week: Celebrating 50 Years of Harper Lee's Classic, 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

July 9, 2010— -- For so many people across the country, both young and old, one name comes to mind when they think about the reading of their childhood -- Harper Lee.

To this day, on the eve of the 50th birthday "To Kill a Mockingbird," Lee's only novel lives on to fulfill its one purpose: to challenge society and one's way of thinking a page at a time.

"Masterpieces are masterpieces not because they are flawless but because they've tapped into something essential to us, at the heart of who we are and how we live," said author Richard Russo in a new documentary called, "Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & 'To Kill a Mockingbird,'" by filmmaker Mary Murphy.

It was the Depression-era story of a spunky young girl nicknamed Scout, who along with her tough-skinned lawyer of a father, Atticus, was forced to endure biting race relations in the South.

The novel, which won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and became an Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck, has never been out of print. In fact, one million copies are sold each year in 40 languages. The Library of Congress even has said that "Mockingbird" is second only to the Bible as books most often cited as making a difference.

Behind it all was a young Southern girl named Nelle Harper Lee, who once joked that she wanted to be South Alabama's Jane Austen.

Like the story's young tomboy narrator, Lee's mother died when she was young. Her father, a lawyer, reportedly was so shaken up after arguing a race case that he never practiced criminal law again. Lee, herself, attempted law school, but soon turned to writing instead.