In fact, it’s a staple of middle and high school reading lists across the country. The town of Maycomb is fictional, but it was based on the real-life location of Monroeville, Alabama, where Lee was ...

Julie Tremaine is a contributing writer at PEOPLE. She has been at PEOPLE since 2022. Her work has previously appeared in Food and Wine, Travel + Leisure, Vulture, CNN Travel, Glamour, and Marie ...