Harper Lee, Author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Dies at 89

A spokeswoman for Harper Collins in NY said Lee passed away peacefully yesterday.

Spencer Madrie, owner of the Ol’ Curiosities & Book Shoppe dedicated to the work of Lee and other Southern authors, said Monroeville was in a sombre mood.

Lee’s father was a lawyer and served as inspiration for her book’s civil rights hero. Susan Hansen, an English teacher at Millhopper Montessori School and an Alabama native, has a signed copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird”, purchased when she visited the town.

But in 2015, she upended the literary world by publishing the unedited manuscript of “Go Set a Watchman” a first novel written in the 1950s and essentially the first draft of “Mockingbird”.

Born Nelle Harper Lee on April 28, 1926, Lee became famous for her 1961 book, To Kill a Mockingbird. “Her masterpiece, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird, ‘ was a defining novel of the 20th century and remains a timeless classic”, he said.

At 34, the glory is instantaneous for Harper Lee, whose real name Nelle Harper Lee, who becomes a kind of moral conscience.

“I would have loved to have met her”, said Walz. “That was the one she would always be known for, and that’s one of the reasons why I think that she didn’t continue to write over the years”.

Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, and Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from Lee’s home state of Alabama, both praised the Pulitzer Prize winning Lee as a great author.

But Lee was a notorious recluse, and refused to talk about her life and work publicly for decades.

But she was also a New Yorker, dividing her time between Manhattan and Monroeville from 1949 until ill health forced her to move to an assisted-living facility.

He was saddened by her death but said the world still has her book.

“Today, I join Alabamians and all Americans in mourning the passing of Harper Lee”, Shelby said in a statement.

Lee did accompany Capote on trips to Kansas when he researched the book’s story of a murder and its aftermath, initially for a story in The New Yorker.

However, since then Lee published “Go Set a Watchman”, a sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

“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.