It is widely believed that Harper Lee based the character of Atticus Finch on her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, a compassionate and dedicated lawyer. The plot of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) was reportedly inspired in part by his unsuccessful defense of two African American men—a father and a son—who were accused of murdering a white storekeeper. The fictional character of Charles Baker (“Dill”) Harris is based on the author Truman Capote, Lee’s childhood friend and next-door neighbor in Monroeville, Alabama. There is some anecdotal evidence that the novel’s town recluse, Arthur (“Boo”) Radley, was based on Lee and Capote’s childhood neighbor, Son Boulware. According to Capote, Boo “was a real man, and he lived just down the road from us.…Everything [Lee] wrote about it is absolutely true.”
The novel was also loosely based on the 1931 case of the “Scottsboro Boys,” in which nine Black youths were wrongly convicted of raping two white women in Alabama. The Scottsboro trials were widely covered in the news both locally and nationally; Lee was about five years old when they began, close in age to her young narrator, Jean Louise (“Scout”) Finch, at the start of To Kill a Mockingbird.