To Kill a Mockingbird is an unpublished short story.
American literature . From the end of World War II up until , roughly , the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the publication of some of the most popular works in American history such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee . To Kill a Mockingbird . It was immediately successful , winning the Pulitzer Prize , and has become a classic of modern American literature . As a Southern Gothic novel and a Bildungsroman , the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence .