What real person may have inspired the character of Boo Radley?

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Book cover for To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, featuring a silhouette of a child under a tree and a large moon, with the title in script and — To Kill a Mockingbird This book cover is one of many given to Harper Lee's classic work *To Kill a Mockingbird* (1960). The novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and the next year was made into an Academy Award-winning film.

There is anecdotal evidence suggesting that the character of Arthur (“Boo”) Radley was inspired by Son Boulware, a man who lived near Harper Lee and her childhood friend Truman Capote in Monroeville, Alabama.1

Capote himself supported this connection, stating that Boo was a real man who lived down the road from them and that the details Lee wrote about the character were accurate to his real-life counterpart.1