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50 free Harper Lee trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Harper Lee wrote one of the most-read novels of the 20th century and then spent 55 years saying almost nothing in public. Born Nelle in Monroeville, Alabama, the daughter of a small-town lawyer, she grew up next door to Truman Capote, dropped out of law school, sold airline tickets in New York and turned a Christmas gift of a year's wages into To Kill a Mockingbird. These 50 questions cover the life around the book: her name and family, Capote and In Cold Blood, the editor Tay Hohoff and the manuscript thrown into the snow, the Pulitzer, Gregory Peck and the family friendship, her father signing autographs as Atticus, the abandoned follow-ups, the 1966 Virginia ban and the Beadle Bumble fund, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the copyright and museum lawsuits, the disputed discovery of Go Set a Watchman and the 2025 collection of early stories. Easy questions stick to the novel and the Oscar; the expert tier asks about Rammer Jammer, The Reverend and the Polish stylometry study. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book-club night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who narrates To Kill a Mockingbird?
Scout
Like Lee, the tomboy Scout is the daughter of a respected small-town Alabama attorney.
Q 02In which decade was To Kill a Mockingbird published?
1960s
It came out on July 11, 1960 and was an immediate bestseller.
Q 03Which award did Lee's novel win in 1961?
Pulitzer Prize
It also won the Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews that year.
Q 04What was Lee's hometown?
Monroeville
Truman Capote spent summers there with relatives from 1928 to 1934.
Q 05What was Lee's actual first name?
Nelle
It was her grandmother's name Ellen spelled backwards.
Q 06Lee's middle name honoured a pediatrician who had done what?
Saved her sister's life
Dr. William W. Harper of Selma saved her sister Louise.
Q 07Why did Lee publish under "Harper Lee" rather than her first name?
To avoid being called Nellie
She feared Nelle would be misread as Nellie.
Q 08What was Lee's father's profession?
Lawyer
He also edited a newspaper and sat in the Alabama legislature, and once defended two black men accused of murder.
Q 09What happened to the two black clients Lee's father once defended on murder charges?
Both were hanged
The father and son were accused of killing a white storekeeper.
Q 10Which Confederate general was Lee related to through her father?
Robert E. Lee
She was a member of the prominent Lee family of Virginia.
Q 11Which famous writer was Lee's childhood friend and neighbour?
Truman Capote
He inspired the character of Dill, and she inspired a character in his first novel.
Q 12Which character in the novel was based on her childhood friend from next door?
Dill Harris
Lee in turn was the model for Idabel in Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms.
Q 13Which Capote book did Lee help research in Holcomb, Kansas?
In Cold Blood
They thought it would be an article about a small town's response to a family's murder.
Q 21Biographer Charles Shields says Lee once did what with her manuscript in frustration?
Threw it out the window into the snow
Her editor told her to march outside immediately and pick up the pages.
Q 22On what date was To Kill a Mockingbird published?
July 11, 1960
It was an immediate bestseller.
Q 23Roughly how many copies of To Kill a Mockingbird are in print?
More than 40 million
Library Journal readers voted it Best Novel of the Century in 1999.
Q 14What did Lee study for several years at the University of Alabama?
Law
She left one semester short of a degree, to her father's disappointment.
Q 15Lee wrote for the University of Alabama's humour magazine, called what?
Rammer Jammer
She also wrote for the campus newspaper, The Crimson White.
Q 16At which English university did Lee attend a 1948 summer school paid for by her father?
Oxford
He hoped it would revive her interest in law; it did not.
Q 17What jobs did Lee take after moving to New York in 1949?
Bookstore, then airline reservations
She wrote in her spare time and found an agent, Maurice Crain, in 1956.
Q 18What Christmas gift from friends in 1956 let Lee write full-time?
A year's wages
The note read: You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please.
Q 19Who was Lee's editor at Lippincott who guided the book through its drafts?
Tay Hohoff
She called the first manuscript more a series of anecdotes than a novel.
Q 20What was the title of the manuscript Lee first delivered to her agent in 1957?
Go Set a Watchman
It was reworked over two years into To Kill a Mockingbird.
Q 24Which 1931 trial may also have shaped the novel's social conscience?
The Scottsboro Boys case
The interracial rape case became a landmark of the Jim Crow era.
Q 25Who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1962 film?
Horton Foote
Lee called it one of the best translations of a book to film ever made.
Q 26Who won an Oscar for playing Scout's father in the 1962 film?
Gregory Peck
Peck's grandson Harper Peck Voll is named after Lee.
Q 27Which Peck relative is named after Harper Lee?
His grandson
The two families became close after the film.
Q 28How did Lee's father sign autographs after the novel's success?
As Atticus Finch
He was thrilled with her success and died in April 1962.
Q 29What was the working title of the follow-up novel Lee abandoned?
The Long Goodbye
She filed it away unfinished and published nothing more until 2015.
Q 30Lee's unfinished 1978 book The Reverend was about what?
A serial murderer and his killer's trial
It was set around Alexander City; she set it aside when unsatisfied.