“It is with a heavy heart that we can confirm the passing of Ms. Harper Lee”.
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Lee suffered a stroke in 2007 and lived a private life in Alabama.
Harper Lee, whose 1961 novel To Kill a Mockingbird became a national institution and the defining text on the racial troubles of the American deep south, has died at the age of 89. The black man was defended by Atticus Finch, whose daughter and son were named Scout and Jim. The author won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year. “In the ensuing years, she has made only rare public appearances, mostly to accept awards, and has not spoken in public except to give a single reading in the 1980s at an Alabama heritage festival”.
Lee reportedly had a second novel in the works, but those rumors didn’t come to fruition until February 2015.
Past year saw the publication of Lee’s recently discovered manuscript, Go Set a Watchman, described as a first draft of the story that evolved into Mockingbird.
The news was announced on the website of Ol’ Curiosities & Book Shoppe. Set two decades after “To Kill a Mockingbird”, the book was met with mixed reviews.
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She moved to New York City in 1949 to pursue her writing career. That only lasted until she went to England as an exchange student at Oxford University.
