“To Kill A Mockingbird” Author Dies

“It is with a heavy heart that we can confirm the passing of Ms. Harper Lee”.

AL.com cites multiple sources in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, who confirmed her death Friday morning. USA librarians named “To Kill a Mockingbird” the best novel of the 20th century, according to a 1999 survey by Library Journal.

The book, which addresses racial issues in the South, was assigned widely in schools.

In 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Lee to the National Council on the Arts, while in 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Lee the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor given by the USA government for “outstanding contributions to the excellence, growth, support and availability of the arts”. “It was like being hit over the head and knocked cold”, she said in 1964.

Nonetheless, “Watchman” flew off the shelves off the strength and reputation of the beloved “Mockingbird“, which turned Atticus Finch into a patron-saint of the Civil Rights Movement. She just didn’t want to talk about it before an audience.

Controversy surrounded Lee in her later years as there were debates over whether her representatives were making important decisions for her, including the decision to release Watchman, but there was never any doubt as to how fans felt about Lee, or the impact she had on their lives through literature. Back in the ’50s, publishers were more interested in the flashbacks contained within “Go Set a Watchman” than in the novel itself, and those flashbacks formed the germ of “To Kill a Mockingbird”. In my Composition I class, one of the assignments is a review, and a student is planning to review “Mockingbird“.

Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. She was named for her maternal grandmother – Ellen, spelled backwards.

Lee’s mother, the former Frances Cunningham Finch, suffered from a nervous disorder. She wrote a letter of thanks in 2001 when the Chicago Public Library chose “Mockingbird” for its first One Book, One Chicago program. For about eight years, she worked as an airline reservationist at Eastern Airlines.

Lee quickly lost enthusiasm for law school. After studying to be a lawyer like her father and older sister, Lee left the university before graduating, heading to NY to become a writer, as Capote already had done.

Even then, she didn’t say much. The novel helped her find an agent, who got her signed to the publisher J.B. Lippincott. As a Christmas present, Brown and his wife gave Lee a year’s stipend to permit her to write full time. She had a publishing contract by year’s end.

Lee researched another book, a non-fiction account of a freaky voodoo murder case in rural east Alabama, but abandoned the project in the 1980s.