8vo. Original green cloth-backed boards (spine slightly leaning); dust jacket (rubbing and short creases along spine folds, some chipping to corners, minor toning to rear panel).

FIRST EDITION of Lee's first novel in the FIRST STATE dust jacket, priced $3.95 and with no printing statement, the present copy with photograph of Harper Lee by Truman Capote on rear panel. "Harper Lee's only novel touched a nerve in American society when it was first published... The author claimed that her story of racial bias in the sleepy fictional Alabama town of Maycomb was pure imagination, but reporters who visited her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, on the 30th anniversary of the book's publication found remarkable similarities to the novel in both setting and character. In essence, the racial ills chronicled in the novel appear to have been realistically drawn from the author's life." (100 Banned Books, pp. 404-405).