Nelle Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Alabama as the youngest of four children. Her father was a newspaper editor and lawyer. As a child she loved to read and enjoyed spending time with her schoolmate and neighbor Truman Capote. She enrolled in law school at the University of Alabama, which she never graduated from. She completed the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1959, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The book became a bestseller immediately after its publication, and it has remained so to this day. In 1999, Library Journal declared the book "the best novel of the century". In 2007, the writer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to literature.