Now, a Literary Moment...

Harper Lee's description of a small southern town in To Kill A Mockingbird is so vivid that many readers feel it's a portrait of their own hometown.

Playwright Horton Foote adapted the novel for the 1962 film version.

Horton Foote: I just felt it could have been set in my little town in Texas. We had a large black population. We had all the prejudices that the book exposes and I think a lot of the virtues which were Southern virtues. This sense of place, a sense of really belonging to something. And this essential conflict of being surrounded by a problem that we still haven't solved.

Horton Foote Discussing Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.

This Literary Moment was created by the National Endowment for the Arts