It was a time of growing racial tension in Alabama. Lee was writing in the aftermath of the 1954 supreme court ruling in Brown v Board of Education which ended legal segregation in public schools in the US. At the time, there were still Scottsboro defendants under sentence of death (the last of them was pardoned by the Alabama governor, George Wallace, in 1976). Lee also drew upon the infamous Scottsboro case of 1931 in which nine black teenagers were accused of the rape of two white girls. A death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and the defendant died in 1937. It was loosely based on a case in 1933 of a black man in her home town of Monroeville who was convicted of rape. The story Lee wanted to tell, which took her more than seven years to complete, was about a black man, Tom Robinson, accused of raping a white woman in a small town in south-western Alabama, which Lee named Maycomb. The book was seen by many as saying something good, something important about America itself. It has never been out of print and is perhaps the most widely loved American novel of the past half-century. Her story of race relations and legal injustice set in the American south in the 1930s, first published in 1960, won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1961, was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1962 and went on to sell more than 40m copies worldwide. Harper Lee, who has died aged 89, was the author of To Kill a Mockingbird.