World Mourns Legendary Author Harper Lee, Dead At 89

But above all, Monroeville was simply home to Lee, who died Friday at age 89.

“All of us are struggling human beings trying to overcome the biases that we inherit from our time and I think that Harper Lee understood that depth in our character”.

Harper Lee, who wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird”, one of America’s literary classics, died Friday in Monroeville, Alabama, at the age of 89, her family confirmed.

It is also very likely that Lee would have been familiar with the story of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old who was lynched in MS after reportedly flirting with a white woman. It is said to have been loosely based on the observations of Lee and an event which happened in her hometown when she was a young girl.

“She was a good companion”, Flynt remembers.

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

“She was coming up on 90 in a couple of months and we talked about her birthday, and I said my wife was going to bring a cake and we were going to put 90 candles on it and burn down the entire town of Monroeville as she tried to blow out the candles”, Flynt said. “I believe she wasn’t strong enough at the end of her life to make any informed decisions about her work”, he said. Surprisingly, when the book was adapted into a movie, I refused to watch it. In spite of the stellar cast (including Mary Badham, Philip Alford, Robert Duvall), I didn’t want to distort the images of Scout, Jem, Atticus, or even Radley, that had already formed in my mind.

The Obamas say the story that Lee told in “To Kill a Mockingbird” – about racial injustice in a small Southern town – changed the way Americans saw each other and changed the way Americans saw themselves.

“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”, Michael Morrison, the president of Lee’s publisher, HarperCollins, said in a statement. “We have lost a great writer, a great friend and a beacon of integrity”.

And herein, perhaps, rests a lesson: Despite our best attempts to confine Lee’s life to the pages she wrote and the characters she created, her own life far exceeded the bounds of her book covers.

A lawyer named Atticus Finch defends Robinson in court.

“The people who have To Kill a Mockingbird seared in memory – their first reading experience of To Kill a Mockingbird seared in their brain – it’s the biggest book club in the world”, Murphy says. Today, Lee’s literature remains as popular and timeless as it ever has been.