'To Kill a Mockingbird' author dies
NEW YORK — Harper Lee, the elusive novelist whose child’s-eye view of racial injustice in a small Southern town in “To Kill a Mockingbird” became standard reading for millions of young people and an Oscar-winning film, has died.
Lee, 89, died peacefully Friday, publisher HarperCollins said in a statement. It did not give any other details about how she died.
“The world knows Harper Lee was a brilliant writer but what many don’t know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness. She lived her life the way she wanted to — in private — surrounded by books and the people who loved her,” Michael Morrison, head of HarperCollins U.S. general books group, said in the statement.
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, Ala., 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.
The book quickly became a best-seller, won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie in 1962, with Gregory Peck winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus. 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.
Lee herself became more mysterious as her book became more famous. At first, she dutifully promoted her work. But she began declining interviews in the late 1960s.
She published no other book until stunning the world in 2015 by releasing “Go Set a Watchman.”
“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.
Despite unenthusiastic reviews and questions about whether Lee was well enough to approve the publication, “Watchman” jumped to the top of best-seller lists within a day of its announcement and remained there for months.
Claudia Durst Johnson, author of a book-length critical analysis of Lee’s novel, described her as preferring to guard her privacy. According to Johnson, Lee also complained that the news media invariably misquoted her.
