Harper Lee was born on 28th April, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. She grew up in the small southwestern Alabama town of Monroeville. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and she enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote, who provided the basis of the character of Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1959, she finished the manuscript for her Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller To Kill a Mockingbird.