Lee, Harper (1960) ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, US first edition

Nelle Harper Lee (1960) ‘To Kill a Mockinbird‘, US first edition, first printing, published by Lippincott.

Condition: a very good book without the dust jacket. There is a small and tasteful bookplate on the front pastdown. No other scribbles, no stamps. Internally clean. No foxing on the page block. The cloth has preserved well and the lettering on the spine is NOT rubbed out. Slights shelf wear including rubbed corners. Clean boards. A nice copy of the Pulitzer Prize winning seminal novel. Only 5,000 copies were printed and with the jacket copies fetch considerably more.

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, Harper Lee’s debut, and effectively only novel (the 2015 published ‘Go Set a Watchman’ is rather an earlier draft of the more polished ‘Mockingbird’), won her the Pulitzer Prize, and is regarded as one of the best novels of 20th century literature. It was adapted as a motion picture in 1962 starring Gregory Peck who was immortalised with his role as Atticus which won him the Academy Award (Peck and Lee became life-long friends). The film won two more Oscars in the Screenplay and Art Direction categories.