‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ author Harper Lee dies at 89

“We will miss her dearly”.

The death of the 89 year author in Alabama happens to come just as Geva Theatre presents a stage play based on To Kill A Mockingbird.

A spokeswoman from the Harper Collins publishing house in NY said she died peacefully Thursday night.

She became embroiled in a high-profile spat with Marja Mills, an author who published an account of her time as Harper and Alice Lee’s neighbor in 2014, claiming that Mills’ representation of the book as authorized by the Lees was false.

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, which inspired the book’s fictional Maycomb. Set in the 1930s South, an era of segregation and Jim Crow, it details the story of a white man defending a black man who is unfairly accused of raping a white woman, while simultaneously conveying the innocent, wonderful adolescence of its narrator, Scout.

An Oscar-winning film adaptation starring Gregory Peck was released in 1962. Completed in 1957, “Watchman” was actually written before “To Kill a Mockingbird” and features Scout and Atticus some 20 years later. The controversy over the novel, and worldwide publicity over the reemergence of the elderly writer, made Watchman an instant best seller. She accomplished the loftiest goals any writer could dare to dream of and surrounded herself with the people she loved most, from working as a research assistant to her friend Capote, to moving back to Monroeville to live with her sister, Alice, after Alice fell ill.

“I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told”, Lee said in a 2015 statement. She had lived in an assisted living facility there for years as her health worsened.

Born Nelle Harper Lee in 1926, the author was the youngest of four children. “And of course the Civil Rights movement: Many people I spoke to who were active in the movement said that the fact that a white Southerner wrote that book gave them hope that justice could prevail”.

As I began to read, we admired Lee’s cadence, her imagery, her vocabulary.

“Oh no. The Great Harper Lee has passed away”. Multiple friends of Lee’s who visited her over the past few years told AL.com last year that her level of alertness and lucidity varied. In a matter of pages, (spoiler alert!) one finds out that Atticus has Rheumatoid arthritis, Jem is dead and Scout is increasingly disillusioned, fighting against different perceptions of her childhood town and her naïve seemingly omniscient and ever-just father.

On the 50th anniversary of Mockingbird’s publication in 2010, Lee remained elusive. I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly, and that is small-town, middle-class Southern life.