Her only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and is ranked by the Guinness Book of World Records as the top selling novel of all time. The novel has sold more than 30 million copies. Last week, To Kill a Mockingbird won the Quill Award for best audiobook of the year for its belated debut on audio.

According to the citation, Lee is being honored for "an outstanding contribution to America's literary tradition. At a critical moment in our history, her beautiful book, To Kill a Mockingbird, helped focus the nation on the turbulent struggle for equality."

The award will be presented to Lee during a ceremony at the White House on Monday, November 5. The ceremony will also honor 1992 Nobel economics prize winner Gary Becker; Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins; civil rights leader Benjamin Hooks; and former House Foreign Affairs committee chairman Henry Hyde.

The production brought together about 60 students from nearly all-white Mountain Brook High and all-black Fairfield High Preparatory School. The 80-year-old Lee was invited as a special guest to be honored by education and arts officials. Famous for prizing her privacy, she rarely speaks to reporters, though she does occasionally meet with students.

The author has not published another book since "Mockingbird," which remains a best-seller even decades after its publication in 1960. After the performance, Al Head, executive director of the Alabama State Council of the Arts, presented Lee with a piece of pottery made by Alabama artist Larry Allen and titled "Unity Vessel." Lee held the piece up toward the cast and crew, who stood behind her onstage, and waved to the audience, which gave a standing ovation. Lee did not address the crowd, but later talked to students at a private reception.

Ms. Lee, now 80, has published virtually nothing of significance since then except a 1983 book review. But now she has written something for publication. It is a letter for O, the Oprah Winfrey magazine, about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town, The Associated Press reported.

In the magazine's July "special summer reading issue," Ms. Lee recalls becoming a reader before she entered first grade. Older sisters and a brother read to her; her mother read her a story a day; her father read her newspaper articles. "Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggily at bedtime," Ms. Lee writes of the popular old-time children's character, right.

She notes that books were scarce in the 1930's in the town, Monroeville, where she still lives part time; and the scarcity of books in a town without movies and parks made them a special treasure. "Now," she writes, "75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books."