became a best-selling critical and popular phenomenon garnering first-time novelist Harper Lee the Pulitzer Prize, among many other honors. A few years later, Lee stopped giving interviews - retreating into a world consisting of a small circle of friends and her older sister Alice. A new book by former Chicago Tribune reporter Maria Mills takes readers into the private world of the Lee sisters. It's called "The Mockingbird Next Door" and our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: It's probably the most off sighted literary fantasy of all time. I'm talking about that passage in "Catcher In The Rye" where Holden Caulfield says, what really knocks me out is a book that when you're all done reading it you wish the author that wrote itwas a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. It sure didn't happen very much with J.D. Salinger who hid out in New Hampshire woods for over half a century until his death in 2010. A reporter for the Chicago Tribune named Maria Mills, however, had better luck with another famous literary recluse. In 2001, she picked up the phone and heard these words - Miss Mills, This is Harper Lee. I wonder if we might meet. So began a professional relationship that morphed into something more. At the time with that phone call, Mills was in Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, doing research for a story on "To Kill A Mockingbird,"