Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird may have seemed timeless when it came out, but times have a way of changing.

Nowadays, Lee's legendary book feels less like a treatise on tolerance and more of a relic of old ideals with racist stereotypes and archaic language mixed in. Perhaps it was appropriate that Atticus Finch revealed his latent racism in the book's much-maligned sequel, To Set a Watchman. Yet To Kill A Mockingbird retains its mythic and omnipresent status, in part because of the looming legacy of Atticus Finch, but also in part because of its wise and famously cantankerous author, the small woman named Harper Lee who wrote her classic (indeed a revolutionary work during its time) and then wrote nothing else for decades.