Widely known for her novel, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Pulitzer award winner, Harper lee passes away at the age of 89
Harper lee, the elusive novelist whose child’s-eye view of racial injustice in a small Southern town, To Kill a Mockingbird, became standard reading for millions of young people and an Oscar-winning film, has died. She was 89.
HarperCollins spokeswoman Tina Andreadis confirmed the authors death to The Associated Press on Friday.
For most of her life, lee divided her time between New York City, where she wrote the novel in the 1950s, and her hometown of Monroeville, which inspired the book’s fictional Maycomb.
To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, is the story of a girl nicknamed Scout growing up in a Depression-era Southern town. A black man has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and Scout’s father, the resolute lawyer Atticus Finch, defends him despite threats and the scorn of many.
The book quickly became a best-seller, won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a memorable movie in 1962, with Gregory Peck winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus. As the civil rights movement grew, the novel inspired a generation of young lawyers, was assigned in high schools all over the country and was a popular choice for citywide, or nationwide, reading programmes.
By 2015, its sales were reported by HarperCollins to be more than 40 million worldwide, making it one of the most widely read American novels of the 20th century. When the library of Congress did a survey in 1991 on books that have affected people's lives, To Kill a Mockingbird was second only to the Bible.
lee herself became more mysterious as her book became more famous. At first, she dutifully promoted her work. She spoke frequently to the press, wrote about herself and gave speeches, once to a class of cadets at West Point.
But she began declining interviews in the late 1960s and, until late in her life, firmly avoided making any public comment at all about her novel or her career. Other than a few magazine pieces for Vogue and McCalls in the 1960s and a review of a 19th century Alabama history book in 1983, she published no other book until stunning the world in 2015 by permitting Go Set a Watchman to be released.
Watchman was written before Mockingbird, but was set 20 years later, using the same location and many of the same characters. Readers and reviewers were disheartened to find an Atticus who seemed nothing like the hero of the earlier book. The man who defied the status quo in Mockingbird was now part of the mob in Watchman, denouncing the Supreme Court’s ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional and denouncing blacks as unfit to enjoy full equality.
Much of lee’s story is the story of Mockingbird, and how she responded to it. She wasn’t a bragger, like Norman Mailer, or a drinker, like William Failkner, or a recluse or eccentric. By the accounts of friends and Monroeville townsfolk, she was a warm, vibrant and witty woman who enjoyed life, played golf, read voraciously and got about to plays and concerts. She just didn't want to talk about it before an audience.
Claudia Durst Johnson, author of a book-length critical analysis of lee’s novel, described her as preferring to guard her privacy “like others in an older generation, who didn’t go out and talk about themselves on Oprah or the letterman show at the drop of a hat.” According to Johnson, lee also complained that the news media invariably misquoted her.
lee emerged more often over the past few years, although not always in ways she preferred. She was involved in numerous legal disputes over the rights to her book and denied she had cooperated with the biography The Mockingbird Next Door: life With Harper lee, by Marja Mills.
Other occasions were happier. She wrote a letter of thanks in 2001 when the Chicago Public library chose Mockingbird for its first One Book, One Chicago program. In 2007, she agreed to attend a White House ceremony at which she received a Presidential Medal of Honor. Around the same time, she wrote a rare published item for O, The Oprah Magazine about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town, and remained one.
“Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books,” she wrote. By 2014, she had given in to the digital age and allowed her novel to come out as an e-book, calling it “‘Mockingbird’ for a new generation.”
like Atticus Finch, her father was a lawyer and state legislator. One of her childhood friends was Truman Capote, who lived with relatives next door to the lees for several years. (A book about lee in 2006 and two films about Capote brought fresh attention to their friendship, including her contributions to Capote’s In Cold Blood, the classic ‘nonfiction novel’ about the murder of a Kansas farm family.