Harper Lee, the enigmatic Southern writer who ignited the literary world with 1960’s To Kill a Mockingbird, died February 19.
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The NY Times has also confirmed the information with the city clerk in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.
This story will be updated soon.
Neighbors knew all about Lee’s dislike for the media and for surprise visitors, so they would rarely direct outsiders to the red-brick home where she lived with her sister for years when not in NY. She wrote a letter of thanks in 2001 when the Chicago Public Library chose “Mockingbird” for its first One Book, One Chicago program.
The Watchman manuscript was found in Lee’s safe deposit box. The character of Scout Finch was thought to be inspired by Lee’s own upbringing.
Lee’s book features Scout’s often meandering recollection of the people – some eccentric, such as the reclusive Boo Radley – in rural Maycomb County, during the years when her brother Jem reaches adolescence and she enters school. The novel is estimated to have some 30 million copies in print.
For decades, the book was Lee’s only major work of published fiction, but it was hugely influential for generations of United States readers. When that book, Go Set a Watchman, was published last summer, it set off debates about the author’s health and how involved she had been in the project. She submitted a draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird“, loosely based on her childhood in deeply-segregated Alabama, to J.B. Lippincott & Co.in 1957.
As a child, Lee attended elementary school and high school just a few blocks from her house on Alabama Avenue.
Harper Lee smiles during a ceremony honoring the four new members of the Alabama Academy of Honor at the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. Its theme could be summed up with the advice that Atticus Finch, the noble lawyer, gave his young daughter, Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”. She helped him research his 1966 crime book In Cold Blood.
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Josh Earnest, a spokesman for President Barack Obama, says Obama had great respect for Lee. Her down- to-earth manner gained entree with townspeople who were put off by Capote’s affectations.
