“To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee has died at the age of 89.
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Her famous novel about a young girl’s experience of racial tensions in a small Southern town has sold tens of millions of copies and been translated into dozens of languages.
Lee lived an nearly reclusive life for decades and it had appeared that her sole literary output would be “To Kill a Mockingbird”, especially since she acknowledged she could not top the Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
1963 – Gregory Peck wins a 1962 Academy Award for Best Actor for the role of Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird”. But an earlier draft of the book, titled “Go Set a Watchman”, was belatedly published as a novel in its own right on July 14, 2015.
Former newspaper reporter Connie Baggett says she knew Lee for years and found her to be friendly and chatty, as long as Lee knew the conversation wasn’t for an interview.
November 5, 2007 – Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President George W. Bush.
She went by Harper, her middle name, because she was afraid her first name, Nelle, would be mispronounced as “Nellie”, not “Nell”. She was quoting Thomas More and setting me straight on Tudor history.
Following the success of her first book, she worked to avoid public attention while insisting that she had no intention of publishing any further works.
A few months prior to Go Set a Watchman’s publication, The Alabama Securities Commission, which handles complaints of elder abuse, concluded a probe into whether financial fraud had been committed in the deal to publish the book.
“Today, we mourn the loss of Alabama’s treasured author Nelle Harper Lee”.
“The question of Atticus’s racism is one of the most important and critical elements in this novel, and it should be considered in the context of the book’s broader moral themes”, the statement reads. The Watchman announcement aroused understandable suspicion given Lee’s repeated insistence over the years that she would never publish another novel, and the 2014 death of her sister and caregiver, Alice Lee.
Those close to Lee have stated that even recently she was in good health and good spirits, though she had spent the last several years in assisted living. It did not give any other details about how she died.
During her lifetime, Lee produced one of the most popular bits of required reading, a book filled with profound quotes from unforgettable characters like Atticus, Scout and even Miss Maudie. She was a lifelong friend with Truman Capote, who she met on summer vacations and later lived in the house next door to hers.
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“We have no reason to believe that she’s not aware of what’s going on based on the questions that were asked and answered during our meeting with her”, investigators said at the time.
