To Kill a Mockingbird.

LEE, Harper (Truman Capote).

Item Number: 73100

Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1960.

First edition of Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel which had an initial first printing of 5,000 copies. Octavo, original green cloth backed brown boards, titles to spine in gilt. Signed by both Harper Lee and Truman Capote on the front free endpaper. Truman Capote’s friendship with Harper Lee began in the summer of 1929 when the two became next door neighbors in Monroeville, Alabama; both were the age of five. They shared a love of reading and began collaborating when Lee was gifted a typewriter by her father as a child. Lee drew on their friendship as inspiration for the characters Lee and Scout in her masterpiece To Kill A Mockingbird; Capote based his tomboy character Idabel Thompkins in his first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms on Lee. They worked together on Capote’s true crime novel, In Cold Blood; Lee acted as his ‘assistant reasearchist’ and edited the final draft of the book. Upon its publication in 1965, Capote failed to acknowledge Lee’s contributions to the book, after which their relationship was never the same. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with light rubbing and wear to the extremities. Jacket design by Shirley Smith. Photograph by Truman Capote. Housed in a custom full morocco clamshell box. Exceptionally rare, this is the first example we have seen signed by both Lee and Capote.

To Kill a Mockingbird became an immediate bestseller and won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The New Yorker declared it "skilled, unpretentious, and totally ingenious". It has gone on to become of the best-loved classics of all time and has been translated into more than forty languages selling more than forty million copies worldwide. Made into the Academy Award-winning film, directed by Robert Mulligan, starring Gregory Peck. It went on to win three Oscars: Best Actor for Gregory Peck, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White, and Best Screenplay for Horton Foote. It was nominated for five more Oscars including Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Mary Badham, the actress who played Scout. In 1995, the film was listed in the National Film Registry. In 2003, the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch the greatest movie hero of the 20th century. In 2007 the film ranked twenty-fifth on the AFI's 10th anniversary list of the greatest American movies of all time. It was named the best novel of the twentieth century by librarians across the country (Library Journal).