How key was that trial to the writing of “To Kill a Mockingbird”?
It was that trial and one that [Harper Lee] remembered from when she was very young [that she wrote about in “To Kill a Mockingbird”]. That trial gave her the impetus for redressing something that her father felt very bad about, which is that he had participated in a trial in which the decision was a foregone conclusion. Lee was made, against his will, a pawn in a much larger system. [Harper Lee] got her literal facts, however, from a case that happened right in Monroeville when she was a girl in the early 1930s. A black man was accused of raping a white woman. His trial lasted about six hours [longer than expected] because he had a pretty good alibi. He was at work at the brick factory and he didn’t know the woman. [The convicted man] lost his mind in prison and was remanded to a local insane asylum. Truman Capote was Harper Lee’s next-door neighbor and closest childhood friend. Did he ever acknowledge himself as Dill in her novel? Oh, yes. He wrote to Detective Dewey with whom he be
